OBJECTIVE Previous studies suggest that dysphonic voices are perceived more negatively than typical voices, and it is possible that vocal perception influences academic achievement and comprehension. This study assessed children's subjective ratings and opinions of a typical and dysphonic voice after performing a language comprehension task in background noise. It also explored if subjective ra...

In this paper, we report on a comparative user study about the quality of mobile speech synthesis methods. We measured the impact of device class, data rate, synthesis method (diphone vs. non-uniform unit-selection) and lexicon usage on speech quality (word comprehension and several subjective satisfaction metrics). Seven practically relevant speech synthesis implementations and one natural voi...

In many situations, readers are asked to learn from multiple documents. Many studies have found that evaluating the trustworthiness and usefulness of document sources is an important skill in such learning situations. There has been, however, no direct evidence that attending to source information helps readers learn from and interpret a document’s content. In this study we examined whether stu...

This study examined the differences among high, mid and low ambiguity tolerance groups in their reading comprehension ability and their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. To this end, 123 first-year college students majoring in Engineering with an age range of 19-25 were stratified into three groups of high, mid and low ambiguity tolerance to participate in the study. They took part...

Listening taking over half of the learners’ time and effort (Nunan, 1998), forms a basis for acquiring much of a language. There are factors affecting listening comprehension and its perception, such as the speech rate, phonological properties of the text, the quality of the recording, the learners’ anxiety, and listening comprehension strategies (Goh, 2000; Hamouda, 2013). At the Iran Language...

than others. The study looked at comprehension and application of irony compared to subjective affective evaluation of irony reported by Polish-speaking adults and with relation to nonverbal intelligence measured with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised-Polish versions (WAIS-R(PL), 2004). Fifty-four subjects aged 20-66 years (28 females and 26 males) participated in Study 1 on subject...

BACKGROUND Consumers are increasingly exposed to comparative healthcare information (information about the quality of different healthcare providers). Partly because of its complexity, the use of this information has been limited. The objective of this study was to examine how the amount of presented information influences the comprehension and use of comparative healthcare information when imp...

This study aims to investigate gender differences in English as a foreign language (EFL) reading comprehension, situational and perceived interest for gender-oriented passages. It also examines whether any variances or those passages cause EFL comprehension. Throughout this research, clear insights about individual the unexplained variance are provided. Two main research questions were formulat...

Feature modeling is a common way to present and manage variability of software and systems. As a prerequisite for effective variability management is comprehensible representation, the main aim of this paper is to investigate difficulties in understanding feature models. In particular, we focus on the comprehensibility of feature models as expressed in Common Variability Language (CVL), which w...

This thesis explores the effect of vocal affect expression on communicative effectiveness. Two studies examined whether positive speaker affect facilitates the encoding and decoding of the message, combining methods from Phonetics and Psychology. The first study explored the relationship between perceived affective state and communicative effectiveness. To obtain a range of naturally occurring ...