one of the major criticisms leveled at task-based language teaching (tblt), despite its countless merits, is developing fluency at the cost of accuracy. the post-task stage affords a number of options to counteract this downside through task repetition and task recycling. these two options are considered to positively affect learners' oral performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexi...

There is considerable interest in fear appeal arguments in both the normative (logical) and the empirical (psychological) literature on argumentation. However, these two streams are, so far, relatively independent of each other. In this paper, an attempt is made to join them together, or at least to open up a canal between them.1 Fear appeal arguments are studied in logic under the category of ...

How does a background conversation affect a foreground conversation? In this scenario, and unlike traditional studies of noise-induced speech modification (Lombard speech), listeners have to cope with the additional challenge of competing speech material. In the current study, pairs of talkers engaged in natural dialogs in the absence or presence of another talker pair. Changes in speech level ...

This study examines modifications to the acoustic and affective qualities of infant-direct speech (IDS) from birth to 12 months. The acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency shows that IDS has the highest level of mean fundamental frequency (F0) in speech to infants at 6 months, and the highest level of pitch range in speech to infants at 12 months. Sex-based differences were evident with mot...

This report describes an ongoing investigation of 4-6 year-old children’s perception of synthetically modified versions of their own recorded speech. Recordings of the children’s speech production are automatically modified so that the initial consonant is replaced by a different consonant. The task for the children is to judge the phonological accuracy (correct vs. incorrect) and the speaker i...

INTRODUCTION Many of the extant notated dances from the early 18th century are throughcomposed. That is, their component step sequences are not repeated in relation to repeats in the music. Especially for more complicated theatre dances, repetition seems not to be the norm in baroque dance. Paradoxically, it appears that the more complicated a section of dance is, the less it bears repeating. Y...