The study was conducted with the aim of examining the rate of foreign language anxiety in male and female language learners. FLCAS (Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale) was administered to two groups of male and female learners. The mean scores of FLCAS indicated a significant difference with females having considerably higher levels of anxiety than males. From 38 female learners,...

Developing rating scales for assessing interactional performance is demanding since it is a relatively complicated procedure. The present study investigated the psychometric characteristics of the CAP rating scale (Wang, 2015) for assessing interactional competence at micro-level. To this end, 160 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were selected based on their performance on TOEFL iBT test from ...

The human auditory cortex is the gateway to the most powerful and complex communication systems and yet relatively little is known about its functional organization as compared to the visual system. Several lines of evidence, predominantly from recent studies, indicate that sound recognition and sound localization are processed in two at least partially independent networks. Evidence from human...

Togetherness of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has been the subject of many recent studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) domain. Few studies, however, have addressed the impact of TBLT on ESP learners’ linguistic production. This study aimed at investigating the impact of task-based teaching on ESP lear...

Linguistic/cultural differences of learners’ native language with English as a foreign language, gender and English proficiency level are among those numerous variables which affect English learning and its quality in Iranian context. The present study was an attempt to illuminate the effects of these variables on performing integrative approach of general English tests (cloze test and recall t...

This paper describes how a virtual agent assists a huam user in collaborative construction tasks by combining manipulative capabilities for assembly actions with conversational capabilities for mixed-initiative dialogue. We present an interaction model for representing the evolving information states of the participants in this interaction. It includes multiple dimensions along which an interac...

The human auditory cortex is the gateway to the most powerful and complex communication systems and yet relatively little is known about its functional organization as compared to the visual system. Several lines of evidence, predominantly from recent studies, indicate that sound recognition and sound localization are processed in two at least partially independent networks. Evidence from human...

Hostility and anger-expression style are personality traits often associated with elevated cardiovascular reactivity and potential heightened risk for cardiovascular disease. In the present study a sample of 50 young, healthy men were divided into groups low or high on the Cook-Medley Hostility scale and on anger-out from Spielberger's Anger Expression scale. Subjects worked on mental arithmeti...

Purpose: Two of the major functions of the human vocal tract are feeding and speaking. As ontogenetically and phylogenetically feeding tasks precede speaking tasks, it has been hypothesised that the skilled movements of the orofacial articulators specific to speech may have evolved from feeding functions. Our objective is to bring evidence to support this hypothesis. Method: Vocal tract articul...

We describe the CASSI (Computer Animated Speech SImulator) software system, which creates facial animations corresponding to X-ray microbeam data. Each data le records a sequence of positions of the tongue, lips, and jaw of a human subject. The CASSI system utilizes Parke's model of a human head, augmented by a representation of the inside of the mouth, including the tongue. CASSI's output is a...