Individuals often feel anxious in anticipation of tasks such as speaking in public or meeting with a boss. I find that an overwhelming majority of people believe trying to calm down is the best way to cope with pre-performance anxiety. However, across several studies involving karaoke singing, public speaking, and math performance, I investigate an alternative strategy: reappraising anxiety as ...

This research was designed to compare the impact of culturally laden Task-based language Teaching (TBLT) and Content-based language Teaching (CBLT) on Iranian intermediate learners' Speaking improvement. Two groups of participants, i. e. the experimental and control groups, were used in this study. In the experimental group, task-based instruction for 20 intermediate students and in the control...

This research study employed a mixed-methods approach to investigate the test takers’ perceptions and anx- iety in relation to an English language proficiency test called Community English Program (CEP). This study also evaluated the direct and semi-direct modes for speaking module of this test. To this end, 300 Eng- lish as Foreign Language (EFL) students were recruited in the study as test ta...

When speaking or producing music, people rely in part on auditory feedback - the sounds associated with the performed action. Three experiments investigated the degree to which alterations of auditory feedback (AAF) during music performances influence the experience of agency (i.e., the sense that your actions led to auditory events) and the possible link between agency and the disruptive effec...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is the most frequently administered confrontational naming test, but the cultural background of the patients may influence their performance in the BNT. The aim of this study was to identify differences in performance in the BNT between a Chinese population in Taiwan, Chinese populations in other areas and a Caucasian population. METHODS A total of...

A classic psycholinguistic problem is parole; in its modern formulation, performance . This paper looks at aspects of parole or performance from a new direction, arguing that it is organized as a dialectic of unlike cognitive modes, a dialectic of gesture imagery and language. This dialectic is the key to the evocation, organization, and ultimate execution of meaningful actions shaped to take l...

A real-world speech recognition system encounters several speaking styles and speaking rates and its accuracy depends highly on the speaking rate, i.e., degrades sharply with very fast or very slow speech (including hyperarticulated speech) In this paper, we propose a generic modeling scheme to capture a range of speaking rates from very slow to very fast with the use of decision trees. This ap...

BACKGROUND English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. AIMS To examine the effect of linguistic structure on working memory perform...

The application of zone of proximal development (ZPD), as a major tenet of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (SCT, 1978), has recently been invited in the L2 learning/teaching profession. This study mainly examined whether Iranian EFL learners’ interactions in diverse ZPD-activated proximal contexts through the use of storytelling instruction could improve their oral (speaking) proficiency and at...