If the target of foreign language teaching is to use the language, communicative language teaching (CLT) seems to be an ideal teaching model. The goal of teaching with this method is to use the language as a medium of communication (Adi, 2012).The application of the communicative approach in teaching English as a foreign language, however, is associated with some problems that can cause the met...

Speech perception is remarkably robust despite many potential communicative obstacles such as background noise and talker variation. One reason for this is that speech sounds are selected to be auditorily distinctive even under adverse listening conditions. For many years, my colleagues and I have been exploring a general account of the distinctiveness of vowels and consonants referred to as th...

The usefulness of teaching pronunciation in language instruction remains controversial. Though past research suggests that teachers can make little or no difference in improving their students’ pronunciation,  current  findings  suggest  that  second  language  pronunciation  can  improve  to  be near  native-like  with  the  implementation  of  certain  criteria  such  as  the  utilization  of...

BACKGROUND The aim of the study was to analyze speech outcome for patients with advanced oral/oropharyngeal cancer treated with reconstructive surgery and adjuvant radiotherapy. METHODS Speech tests (communicative suitability, intelligibility, articulation, nasality, and consonant errors) were performed in a control group and in patients before treatment (n = 76), and 6 months (n = 51) and 12...

Language can be viewed as a set of cues that modulate the comprehender's thought processes. It is a very subtle instrument. For example, the literature suggests that people perceive direct speech (e.g., Joanne said: 'I went out for dinner last night') as more vivid and perceptually engaging than indirect speech (e.g., Joanne said that she went out for dinner last night). But how is this alleged...

Abstract: Avoiding the current terminology debates in the literature on politeness research  and following  a  variational  pragmatics  approach,  this  study  attempted  to  illuminate  how appropriacy/  inappropriacy  is  realized  in  Persian  language  in  light  of  five  speech  acts  of introduction,  apology,  refusal,  congratulation,  and  condolence.  Additionally,  it  was  aimed  t...

Previous work has shown that read and spontaneous monologues differ prosodically both in production and perception. In this paper, we examine to which extent similar effects can be found between spontaneous and read, or rather re-enacted, dialogues. It is possible that speakers can mimic conversational prosody very well. Another possibility is that in re-enacted dialogues, prosody is actually u...

A dialogue agent is one that can interact and communicate with other agents in a coherent manner not just with one shot messages but with a sequence of related messages all on the same topic or in service of an overall goal Following the basic insights of speech act theory these communications are seen not just as transmitting information but as actions which change the state of the world Most ...

Speech acts in natural language dialogues can be regarded as intentional acts performed by a dialogue participant to innuence the relevant aspects of the mental state of a recipient. In this paper, a framework is discussed for deriving the beliefs and intentions of a speaker from a certain speech act. To this end, the notion of a speech act is replaced by the formal notion of a communicative ac...

Communication plays a crucial role in influencing our social life. However, communication has often been distorted by unequal opportunities to initiate and participate in it. Such conditions have been criticized by Habermas who argues for an ideal speech situation, i.e. a situation of democratic communication with equal opportunities for social actors to communicate in an undistorted manner. Th...