The goal of this exploratory study is to investigate the effect of working memory capacity on L2 oral fluency in 79 learners of English as a foreign language. Three tasks were used as measures of working memory (the reading span task, letter span task and an attention-switching task). Twelve measures of fluency were used spanning across speed, breakdown and repair fluency. Positive correlations...

Language alterations in Huntington's disease (HD) are reported, but their nature and correlation with other cognitive impairments are still under investigation. This study aimed to characterize the language disturbances in HD and to correlate them to motor and cognitive aspects of the disease. We studied 23 HD patients and 23 controls, matched for age and schooling, using the Boston Diagnostic ...

BACKGROUND Spoken and gestural communication proficiency varies greatly among autistic individuals. Three studies examined the role of oral- and manual-motor skill in predicting autistic children's speech development. METHODS Study 1 investigated whether infant and toddler oral- and manual-motor skills predict middle childhood and teenage speech fluency; Study 2 verified those early infant an...

Thirty-six English language learners aged 6;8 to 12;6 years received practice with The Reading Tutor, which uses speech recognition to listen to oral reading and provides context-sensitive feedback. A crossover research design controlled effects of classroom instruction. The first subgroup worked with the software for 3.5 months, and following a week’s crossover period, the second subgroup work...

Fluency in a second language (L2) involves a quintessentially cognitive processing system that operates quickly and effectively. The perceived importance of researching fluency through a psycholinguistic lens has motivated the related L2 research to resort to current cognitive speaking-specific models. This study, drawing on Levelt’s (1999a) psycholinguistic model, probed the deficiency sources...

This article reviews the conceptualization, measurement, and design of brief experimental analysis for oral reading fluency problems. It presents examples from the literature of how brief experimental analysis results have been used to generate effective treatments for a variety of different applications (e.g., parent tutoring, small group, selfmanaged interventions). It also describes three di...

A folk assumption about colloquial speech is that taboo words are used because speakers cannot find better words with which to express themselves: because speakers lack vocabulary. A competing possibility is that fluency is fluency regardless of subject matter—that there is no reason to propose a difference in lexicon size and ease of access for taboo as opposed to emotionally-neutral words. In...

BACKGROUND The purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of oral health conditions on cognitive functioning on basis of data samples from several European countries. METHODS Secondary analyses were conducted of data from wave 2 of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) which includes 14 European countries and is intended to be representative of each countr...

Students with weak reading skills are at risk for school difficulty. Among the indicators of reading difficulty, reading fluency is a strong predictor of overall reading problems. A multiple baseline across small groups of students design was used to evaluate the effects of explicit oral reading fluency instruction. Based on universal screening data, 6 fourth grade students who scored between t...