In this large-scale corpus study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish Speech Framing Expressions (SFEs).While the whole SFE is taken into account in the semantic analysis, our specific focus is the finite verb of the SFE. The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as repr

The detrimental effect of a lengthy summer vacation on important scholastic abilities such as reading, writing and mathematical skills is relatively well documented, but how language skills are affected by summer vacation is less investigated. The purpose of our study is to investigate how lexical organization and retrieval assessed by a semantic verbal fluency (SVF) task and oral narrative abilit

Observational learning is a successful method for improving writing skills in various genres. We explore effects of a five lesson intervention series based on peer observation. Fifty-five Swedish 5th-grade students aged 10-12 years followed this intervention program. The language and reading comprehension and working memory capacity were tested. The students watched short film-clips with peers wor

Bilingual children are at a disadvantage when compared to monolingual norms in language assessment. Monolingual assessment fails to acknowledge the asymmetrically distributed linguistic competence of bilingual children, for example, different levels of mastery of family and school related concepts in the first and second languages, respectively. Consequently, monolingual assessment results in an o

Despite medical, technical, and pedagogical advances, the risk for language impairment is still much higher in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children than in hearing peers. Research on linguistic, cognitive, and communicative development in DHH children has found a range of basic spoken language deficits. Twenty percent to 50% of deaf children still meet criteria for language impairment. Tests of

Even if there is evidence of play from all vertebrate classes suggesting origins in deep time, descriptions of the evolution of play are surprisingly patchy. To bridge this gap, one must study play comparatively and include taxa from key phylogenetic positions. This study is the first systematic description of play in greater rheas, and thereby the first such report on any palaeognath bird. Palaeo

Objective: Children's own ratings and opinions on their schools sound environments add important information on noise sources. They can also provide information on how to further improve and optimize children's learning situation in their classrooms. This study reports on the Swedish translation and application of an evidence-based questionnaire that measures how children perceive the acoustic env

The present study reports on the development of a questionnaire that evaluates children's experiences of their physical classroom environment, activities and interactions. It also explores the psychometric properties of the questionnaire and how acoustical characteristics of the classroom, class size and student characteristics (age, sex and Swedish as a second language) influence the self-reporte

Code review occupies a significant amount of developers’ work time and is an established practice in modern software development. Despite misaligments between users’ goals and the code review tools and processes pointed out by recent research, the code review tooling has largely stayed the same since the early 90s. Improving these tools, even slightly, has the potential for a large impact spread o

Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) exhibit a suite of stone handling behaviours (SHB, e.g. rolling, pounding, etc.) that lack an obvious instrumental function. As SHBs appear to be socially transmitted, previous research has focused on evolutionary theories of tool use and cumulative culture. It has been assumed that SHBs in general represent a form of solitary play whose function is to hone and m

Cognitive control is a skill used to control one’s own behaviour to reach a goal. We compared this skill across archosaurs by using the distraction task on American alligators, emus, chickens, and common ravens. We investigated whether the animals would still find a food reward hidden behind one of two identical opaque barriers after picking up a food distraction. Results show that all species can

Formants (vocal tract resonances) are increasingly analyzed not only by phoneticians in speech but also by behavioral scientists studying diverse phenomena such as acoustic size exaggeration and articulatory abilities of non-human animals. This often involves estimating vocal tract length acoustically and producing scale-invariant representations of formant patterns. We present a theoretical frame

The idea to create pictorial narratives seems to have occurred long after humans learned to produce iconic images, that is, depictions based on visual similarity to external objects. In Scandinavia, e.g., in Gärde, Sweden or Stykket and Bøla, Norway, early Mesolithic images (e.g., rock carvings from before c. 5000 BCE) often feature animals that are solitary or without suggestion of causal or narr

Objective: This study explores the effect of voice quality and competing speaker/-s on children’s performance in a passage comprehension task. Furthermore, it explores the interaction between passage comprehension and cognitive functioning. Methods: Forty-nine children (27 girls and 22 boys) with normal hearing (aged 7–12 years) participated. Passage comprehension was tested in six different liste

Preening behaviours are widespread in extant birds. While most birds appear to autopreen (self-directed preening), allopreening (preening directed at conspecifics) seems to have emerged only in certain species, but across many families. Allopreening has been hypothesised to reinforce mutual relationships and cooperation between individuals, and to underpin various socio-cognitive abilities. Palaeo

Acoustic correlates of physical effort are still poorly understood, even though effort is vocally communicated in a variety of contexts with crucial fitness consequences, including both confrontational and reproductive social interactions. In this study 33 lay participants spoke during a brief, but intense isometric hold (L-sit), first without any voice-related instructions, and then asked either

Humans have an irresistible inclination to coordinate actions with others, leading to species-unique forms of cooperation. According to the highly influential Shared intentionality theory (SITh), human cooperation is made possible by shared intentionality (SI), typically defined as a suite of socio-cognitive and motivational traits for sharing psychological states with others, thereby enabling ind

Aim: Students with hearing loss (HL) often fall behind hearing peers in complex language tasks such as narrative writing. This study explored the effects of school grade, gender, cognitive and linguistic predisposition and audiological factors on narrative text quality in this target group.Method: Eleven students with HL in Grades 5–6 and 7–8 (age 12–15) who took part in a writing intervention wro