Ways of Developing Musical Taste in Adolescents in the Process of Mastering Vocal Works of Foreign Pop

the modern cultural preferences of children and youth pose the task for teachers of aesthetic education of students, the formation of their musical tastes in the process of teaching. This problem receives a special sound when students of foreign pop are included in the educational repertoire. On the one hand, children get the opportunity to expand their horizons, deepen ideas about the styles and genres of modern music, get acquainted with the work of famous foreign pop singers of the past and the present, master new techniques of performance, increase the level of proficiency in a foreign language, etc. On the other hand, the question arises about the correspondence of these works to the age characteristics of novice vocalists, about the content side of mastered music. Picking up a foreign repertoire, the teacher, as a rule, turns to the work of pop performers whose works are addressed to an adult listener, which requires an extremely attentive attitude to what information is contained in the words of the song.

Is That How You Should Talk to Her? Using Appropriate Prosody Affects Adults’, But Not Children’s, Judgments of Communicators’ Competence

Two studies explored whether the appropriateness of a speaker’s prosodic style (i.e., pitch, volume, speech rate) affects observers’ judgments of speakers’ and listeners’ competence. Adults and school-aged children watched videos of speakers addressing a listener using prosodic styles that were either appropriate (e.g., adult-directed for an adult listener) or inappropriate (e.g., child-directed for an adult listener). Adults, but not children, awarded higher ratings in some domains of communicative competence to speakers and listeners when a speaker used appropriate prosodic styles.

Can Children Substitute for Adult Listeners in Judging the Intelligibility of the Speech of Children Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing?

PurposeAssessments of the intelligibility of speech produced by children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) provide unique insights into functional speaking ability, readiness for mainstream classroom placements, and intervention effectiveness. The development of sentence lists for a wide age range of children and the advent of handheld digital recording devices have overcome two barriers to routine use of this tool. Yet, difficulties in recruiting adequate numbers of adults to judge speech samples continue to make routine assessment impractical. In response to this barrier, it has been proposed that children who are 9 years or older might be adequate substitutes for adult listener-judges (Ertmer, 2011).MethodTo examine this possibility, 22 children from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades identified words from speech samples previously judged by adults.ResultsChildren in the 3rd and 4th grades identified fewer words than adults, whereas scores for 5th graders were not significantly different from those of the adults. All grade levels showed increasing scores across low, mid, and high levels of intelligibility.ConclusionsChildren who are functioning at a 5th grade level or higher can act as listener-judges in speech intelligibility assessments. Suggestions for implementing assessments and scoring child-listeners' written responses are discussed.

Repeated Reading versus Continuous Reading: Influences on Reading Fluency and Comprehension

In this research we evaluated two methods to improve the reading fluency of struggling readers. Poor readers in Grades 2 and 4 with ( n = 17) and without ( n = 20) learning disabilities were randomly assigned to one of two fluency practice variations or to a control group. Students in the treatments practiced reading aloud under repeated or continuous reading conditions with an adult listener in 15-min sessions, 3 days per week for 14 weeks. For students in the treatment conditions, growth curve analyses revealed significant differences in fluency and reading comprehension over students in the control. We found no significant differences between practice conditions.

Learning to parse and its implications for language acquisition

This article describes what is known about the adult end-state, namely, that the adult listener recovers the syntactic structure of an utterance in real-time via interactive probabilistic parsing procedures. It examines evidence indicating that similar mechanisms are at work quite early during language learning, such that infants and toddlers attempt to parse the speech stream probabilistically. In the case of learning, though, the parsing is in aid of discovering relevant lower-level linguistic formatives such as syllables and words. Experimental observations about child sentence-processing abilities are still quite sparse, owing in large part to the difficulty in applying adult experimental procedures to child participants; reaction time, reading, and linguistic judgement methods have all have been attempted with children. The article discusses real-time sentence processing in adults, experimental exploration of child sentence processing, eye movements during listening and the kindergarten-path effect, verb biases in syntactic ambiguity resolution, prosody and lexical biases in child parsing, parsing development in a head-final language, and the place of comprehension in a theory of language acquisition.

Children’s gestures are meant to be seen

This study investigated whether children alter their gestures when their listeners cannot see those gestures. Sixteen kindergarten children viewed four short cartoon episodes. After each episode, the child retold the story to an adult listener. For two episodes, the child and listener sat face-to-face, and for the other two episodes, an opaque curtain was placed between them. Children gestured at a significantly higher rate when they could see their listeners than when they could not. However, the amount, fluency, and content of children’s speech did not differ across conditions. Thus, kindergarten children alter their gestures to suit their listeners, and the observed changes in gesture do not appear to depend on changes in speech.

Departures in the spoken narratives of normal and language-disordered children

ABSTRACTThe spoken narratives of 38 normal and language-disordered children (CA 7;6–10;6) were analyzed by describing their departures from the original text during recall. The narrative texts were presented to an adult listener following each child's viewing of a 35-minute film. The following departure types were compared across groups: (a) acceptable departures from the original text meaning, (b) unacceptable departures from the original text meaning, (c) grammatical departures (i.e., agrammatical utterances), (d) exact repetitions of words or phrases, (e) unacceptable departures from the text's meaning correctly repaired, (f) unacceptable departures from the text meaning incorrectly repaired, (g) departures from text meaning left unrepaired, and (h) repaired grammatical departures. Results indicated that both groups used a higher rate of acceptable departures from the original text meaning than any other departure type, with the normal children producing a higher rate of acceptable departures and a lower rate of unacceptable grammatical departures. Both groups repaired fewer unacceptable grammatical departures than unacceptable departures from text meaning. The groups did not differ in their tendency to ignore grammatical departures. Implications for language processing in narrative discourse are discussed.