We describe guest speaker presentations that we developed to bring language science to elementary school students via videoconference. By using virtual backgrounds and guided discovery learning, we effectively engage children as young as 7 years in in-depth explorations of language science concepts. We share the core principles that guide our presentations and describe two of our outreach activities, Speech Detectives and Bilingual Barnyard. We report brief survey data from 157 elementary school students showing that they find our presentations interesting and educational. While our pivot to virtual outreach was motivated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it allows us to reach geographically diverse audiences, and we suggest that virtual guest speaker presentations will remain a viable and effective method of public outreach.

No abstract

Phonemic restoration, the illusion in which listeners perceive a word as intact when a phoneme is replaced by non-speech noise, has been shown in both adults and children (Warren 1970; Newman 2004). Phonemic restoration appears to have a lexical basis (Samuel 1997); however, bilingual listeners may be limited in their ability to engage this top-down skill because their lexical knowledge is necessarily less robust in a given language than that of their monolingual peers. Bilingual phonemic restoration has rarely been shown, particularly in sentences, but exploring it allows us to better understand the top-down linguistic factors of the effect. In the present study, monolingual and bilingual English speakers listened to and transcribed 92 low-predictability sentences in four conditions: no noise, pink noise throughout, pink noise-filled gaps, and silent gaps. Here “bilingual” includes both crib bilinguals and English L2 speakers. Preliminary results suggest that monolingual listeners show the standard phonemic restoration effect such that transcription is more accurate for filled-gap than silent-gap sentences, but that bilingual listeners do not. For bilingual listeners only, English verbal fluency scores are positively correlated with transcription accuracy in all three degraded conditions (noise throughout, filled-gap, and silent gap), suggesting that language proficiency contributes to listeners' ability to comprehend speech in various types of noise.

Purpose: We aim to provide a tutorial describing how atypical disfluencies can be assessed from a psycholinguistic perspective. We specifically focus on word-final repetitions (WFRs), e.g., “school-ool”. Methods: We identify the type of data that can be used to assess whether WFRs arise from difficulty at each stage of the word production process. WFRs produced by an adolescent with autism spectrum disorder are used to assess difficulty at each of these stages. Results: WFRs tended to occur on content rather than function words, and the portion repeated seemed to be driven by the syllabic rather than morphological structure. The pause time between the end of a WFR-containing word and the beginning of the repetition (e.g., between “school” and “ool”) was at least 298 ms. In contrast, there was only an audible pause between the repetition and the next word 42% of the time; the other 58% of the time, the repetition led directly into the next word. WFRs also tended to occur in longer utterances and in utterance-medial and -final positions. Conclusion: Our analysis suggested that the best candidates for loci where the production process breaks down to cause WFRs are (a) external channel monitoring of WFR words, which is consistent with the long pauses that occurred between the WFR word and the repetition, or (b) syntactic planning, which is supported by the occurrence of WFRs away from utterance-initial words and in longer utterances. We discuss the limitations of data collected through language sampling and make suggestions for future research.

We describe guest speaker presentations that we developed to bring language science to elementary school students via videoconference. By using virtual backgrounds and problem-based learning, we effectively engage children as young as 7 years in in-depth explorations of language science concepts. We share the core principles that guide our presentations and report data from 157 elementary school students showing that they find our presentations interesting and educational. While our pivot to virtual outreach was motivated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it allows us to reach geographically diverse audiences, and we suggest that virtual guest speaker presentations will remain a viable and effective method of public outreach.