Previous research shows that pausing and disfluencies are common in non-native speech. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between fluency and pausing in Russian read-aloud speech of 12 Finnish university students and examine their fluency development during a 3.5-month study-period in Russia. To assess fluency, 30 Russian teachers rated the students’ speech samples (on a ...

Although memory is typically measured by recall or recognition, it is also expressed by fluent or stylized task performance. In this experiment, 12 volunteers (called speakers) completed four experimental stages over a 2-week period. They read printed words aloud in two sessions, before and after exposure to auditory training tokens. They later completed a recognition memory test, discriminatin...

Repetition priming of masked word identification is reduced when initial exposure to target words is in a text rather than in a word list. We demonstrate that there is nothing special about the text context that reduces priming. In Experiment 1, target words read in normal text or in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) text--either coherent or scrambled--produced similarly reduced priming, ...

Researchers investigated the effects of a read-aloud modification on students' performance on a reading comprehension test. A total of 338 students in Grades 4 and 5 participated; 76 of these students (22%) received special education services, the majority of whom were labeled learning disabled. Students completed a standardized reading comprehension test under two conditions: (a) standard admi...

Think-aloud protocols are a dominant method in usability testing. There is, however, only little empirical evidence on the actual validity of the method. This paper describes an experiment that compares concurrent and retrospective think-aloud protocols for a usability test of an online library catalogue. There were three points of comparison: usability problems detected, overall task performan...

Salah satu ketrampilan yang memberikan kemampuan masyarakat untuk bertahan hidup pada era abad 21 adalah literasi membaca tercermin dalam dan kemauan membaca. Hasil kajian teoritis praktis menunjukkan bahwa strategi Read Aloud merupakan efektif menstimulasi tumbuh kembangnya kedua kebutuhan tersebut. Di pihak lain pengetahuan melaksanakan masih belum memadahi. Hal ini terlihat dari rendahnya ni...

The production effect is the superior retention of material read aloud relative to material read silently during an encoding episode. Thus far it has been explored using isolated words tested almost immediately. The goal of this study was to assess the efficacy of production as a study strategy, addressing: (a) whether the production benefit endures beyond a short session, (b) whether productio...

Spontaneous conversational speech has many characteristics that are currently not well modelled in unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis. But in order to build synthetic voices more suitable for interaction we need data that exhibits more conversational characteristics than the generally used read aloud sentences. In this paper we will show how carefully selected utterances from a spont...

The production effect refers to the benefit in memory for items read aloud relative to items read silently during study. Previous research has explained this benefit as due to distinctiveness, attributable to the additional dimension of encoding for the aloud items that is later used during retrieval. We investigated the production effect in older adults, a population known to have difficulty u...