A computer-based Spoken Spanish Test (SST) was developed to provide an accurate and convenient assessment of speaking and listening for learners of Spanish. The SST is intended to measure a candidate’s receptive familiarity with a variety of forms of Spanish and the candidate’s facility in speaking Spanish. The SST test takes between 15 and 20 minutes to complete, all the items are presented in...

The present study focuses on individual differences in levels of communicative anxiety (CA) and foreign language anxiety (FLA) in the first (L1), second (L2), third (L3) and fourth (L4) language of 106 adult language learners. Data were collected about CA / FLA levels when speaking with friends, with strangers, and speaking in public. The analyses revealed that multilinguals do experience more ...

Educational Achievement in English-Speaking Countries: Do Different Surveys Tell the Same Story? International surveys of educational achievement are typically analysed in isolation from each other with no indication as to whether new results confirm or contradict those from earlier surveys. The paper pulls together results from four surveys to compare average levels of achievement, inequality ...

Scaling is a convenient and equipment-free means for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and clients to evaluate stuttering severity in everyday situations. This study investigated the extent to which the severity ratings of 10 adult stuttering speakers, made immediately after speaking and again from recordings 6 months later, agreed with ratings made by an SLP. For 9 of the 10 speakers, there ...

Speaker diarization is the task of automatically identifying speaker identities and detecting their speaking times in an audio recording. Several algorithms have shown improvements performance this during past years. However, it still has challenges interaction scenarios, such as between a child adult, where interruptions, fillers, laughs other elements may affect detection clustering segments....

Diffusion tensor imaging was used to compare white matter structure between American monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual adults living in the United States. In the bilingual group, relationships between white matter structure and naturalistic immersive experience in listening to and speaking English were additionally explored. White matter structural differences between groups were found ...

This study focused on the effect of transcribing task, as a noticing activity, on EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy. For 20 sessions, oral discussion tasks were assigned to 2 intermediate adult EFL classrooms, with 1 class serving as the control group and the other as the experimental group. For this purpose, the learners were divided into groups of 3 or 4 in each class. Learners in both group...

AIMS AND BACKGROUND The main national and international organisms recommend continuous monitoring of psychological distress in cancer patients throughout the disease trajectory. The reasons for this concern are the high prevalence of psychological distress in cancer patients and its association with a worse quality of life, poor adherence to treatment, and stronger assistance needs. Most screen...

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Po...