The term ‘investor relations’ (IR) often refers only to the very formal and primarily anonymous relations and communication between publicly traded companies and their (potential) shareholders. Especially for young and not yet publicly traded companies (socalled start-ups), it can be shown that the individual contact to a very small and well-known group of investors (e.g., venture capital inves...

This study aims to analyze whether the rehabilitation of cancer surviving patients (CSPs) can be better organized. The data for this paper consists of focus group interviews (FGIs) with CSPs, general practitioners (GPs) and hospital physicians. The analysis draws on the theoretical framework of Jürgen Habermas, utilizing his notions of 'the system and the life world' and 'communicative and stra...

background: due to high prevalence of infertility, increasing demand for infertility treatment, and provision of high quality of fertility care, it is necessary for healthcare professionals to explore infertile couples’ expectations and needs. identification of these needs can be a prerequisite to plan the effective supportive interventions. the current study was, therefore, conducted in an att...

People modify their voice to accommodate the communicative needs of their audience. Previously, speech recipient groups with communicative needs such as foreigners and infants have been investigated, however, there is a lack of research into speech directed to hearing-impaired people. The aim of our study was to investigate prosodic modifications in speech directed to hearing-impaired people an...

Mandarin lexical tones are modified in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech, resulting in tone hyperarticulation. However, it is unclear if these registers also alter contextual tones (neutral tone and tone sandhi) and if such phonetic modification might affect acquisition of these tones. This study therefore examined how neutral tone and tone sandhi are realized in IDS, and how...

Background For vocational English courses to adequately address the language needs of today’s industries, it is of vital importance to incorporate into the course materials and classroom activities details and characteristics of the real-world communication tasks that trade practitioners are required to perform in their workplaces [1]. As part of a recent study conducted by the Languages Discip...

Patients with chronic aphasia were assigned randomly to a group to receive either conventional aphasia therapy or constraint-induced (CI) aphasia therapy, a new therapeutic technique requiring intense practice over a relatively short period of consecutive days. CI aphasia therapy is realized in a communicative therapeutic environment constraining patients to practice systematically speech acts ...

This paper presents the basic rationale behind the development and testing of a multimodal communication aid especially designed for people suffering from global aphasia, and thus having severe expressive difficulties. The principle of the aid is to trigger patient associations by presenting various multimodal representations of communicative expressions. The aid can in this way be seen as a co...

Although aphasia is a common neurological condition, and its diagnostic procedure is mostly established, it is not easy to fully evaluate the communicative ability of each patient, as there are huge interindividual differences among patients, and their abilities may vary depending on their circumstances. Even with the advancement of neuroimaging technique, the relationship between lesion locali...