The different level of transparency of letter-sound mapping in various orthographies has been found to influence reading development across languages. The Hebrew orthography represents a special case of within language design with two versions of the script, a transparent (vowelized) and an opaque one (unvowelized). In this study we conducted a within and between comparison of word reading flue...

This pilot study aimed to investigate the effects of two classroom instructions on complexity, accuracy, and fluency EFL learners’ speaking. The first one involved implicit task-based instruction with meaning-focused pedagogic tasks. second reduced practice time but complemented it explicit strategy-based (SBI) raise their metacognitive awareness in planning, monitoring, evaluating speech. Part...

Two new studies provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis that absolute pitch is strongly influenced by a speech-related critical period. The first study examined the prevalence of absolute pitch among students in at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, as a function of age of onset of musical training, ethnicity, fluency in speaking a tone language, and country o...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved v...

PURPOSE Speaking, which naturally occurs in different modes or "tasks" such as conversation and repetition, relies on intact basal ganglia nuclei. Recent studies suggest that voice and fluency parameters are differentially affected by speech task. In this study, the authors examine the effects of subcortical functionality on voice and fluency, comparing measures obtained from spontaneous and ma...

Several investigations have suggested that age, education and culture affect semantic fluency. To date, there is no research work indicating whether there are differences among speakers of the same language but from different countries. It has been proposed that despite having the same language, each Spanish-speaking country should have its normative data. The purpose of this study was to analy...

This work reports on the construction of a rated database of spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) learners of English. Spontaneous speech was collected from 28 L2 speakers representing six language backgrounds and five different proficiency levels. Speech was elicited using formats similar to that of the TOEFL iBT and the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test. ...