background: the comprehension processes are often inferred or explored indirectly through the assessment of the performance of the students on certain tasks. comprehension is typically measured by the techniques in which the test-taker reads a short text and then selects the correct answers in multiple choice questions, true/false and yes/no tasks or matching activities. purpose: a new approach...

In the methodology of teaching a foreign language «writing» and «written speech» act both as means goal language. The article examines concepts speech». main skills abilities that students should master in process written speech are determined

Using the cognitive architecture ACT-R/E, we designed a framework for implementing cognitively plausible spoken language understanding on an embodied agent using incremental frame representations for multiple levels of linguistic knowledge. Emphasis is placed on semantics, pragmatics, and speaker intent.

Spoken language (SL) system development is an increasingly interdisciplinary effort. Speech-to-speech system development, for example, involves speech engineers, software engineers, phoneticians, and a variety of computational linguistic subdisciplines from morphology, syntax and lexicology through semantics and pragmatics, each with their own historically motivated terminology. In our experien...

Previous research has found that iconic gestures (i.e., gestures that depict the actions, motions or shapes of entities) identify referents that are also lexically specified in the co-occurring speech produced by proficient speakers. This study examines whether concrete deictic gestures (i.e., gestures that point to physical entities) bear a different kind of relation to speech, and whether thi...

This study reports the results of an investigation of subject properties in the spontaneous speech of 14 4-year old English speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and two control groups (age and MLUm). It is shown that while the children with SLI perform much below their age-level with respect to grammatical properties of subjects (subject-verb agreement, subject case), they ...

Automaticity and real-time aspects of performance are directly relevant to L2 spoken language proficiency. This paper analyzes data from L2 speakers of English and Spanish spread over a range of proficiency levels as identified by traditional holistic, rubric-based human ratings. In spontaneous speech samples from these L2 populations, we studied timed measures of spoken fluency (linguistic uni...

Recently a number of quasi-experimental studies have investigated the potential of a crossmodality transfer of second language competency between real-time, conversational exchange via text and speech (Abrams, 2003; Beauvious, 1998; Kost, 2004; Payne & Whitney, 2002). Payne and Whitney employed Levelt's (1989) model of language production and concepts from working memory as a rationale for a hy...

Brain imaging studies of voice perception often contrast activation from vocal and verbal tasks to identify regions uniquely involved in processing voice. However, such a strategy precludes detection of the functional relationship between speech and voice perception. In a pair of experiments involving identifying voices from native and foreign language speech we show that, even after repeated e...