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        <title>Frontiers in Communication | Language Communication section | New and Recent Articles</title>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/sections/language-communication</link>
        <description>RSS Feed for Language Communication section in the Frontiers in Communication journal | New and Recent Articles</description>
        <language>en-us</language>
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        <pubDate>2026-08-20T14:32:19.809+00:00</pubDate>
        <ttl>60</ttl>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1898373</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1898373</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Perceived credibility of native and non-native accents during voice-AI interactions]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-17T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Anne Pycha</author><author>Georgia Zellou</author>
        <description><![CDATA[When a human speaks with a non-native accent, it can affect the listener's interpretation of the message. The current study investigated how listeners respond when AI speaks with a non-native accent, and whether listeners’ usage of voice-AI affects those responses. Participants, who were L1 English speakers from the U.S., listened to statements produced by neural text-to-speech in Mexican Spanish-accented English (Experiment 1) or European Spanish- and French-accented English (Experiment 2), as well as American English. They rated the credibility of the information content as well as the voice assistant itself. Results of Experiment 1 reveal no overall difference in ratings for the two accents, a finding which differs from previous results with human voices. Frequent users of voice-AI also gave more positive ratings overall, and this effect was largely due to higher ratings for Mexican Spanish-accented voice assistants. Results of Experiment 2 reveal that a distinctive pattern of responses to the European French accent, compared to the other two accents, and frequent users of voice-AI also produced a distinctive pattern of results, compared to infrequent users. We interpret these findings in terms of anthropomorphism, namely the extent to which frequent versus infrequent users of voice-AI are willing to attribute human characteristics to a non-human entity.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1811238</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1811238</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Minho Spoken Syllable Pool: a European Portuguese database]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-17T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Ana Paula Soares</author><author>David Tomé</author><author>André Araújo</author><author>Vinicius Canonici</author><author>Diana R. Pereira</author><author>Ana Cláudia Rodrigues</author><author>Alberto Lema</author><author>Helena Mendes Oliveira</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionExperimental psycholinguistic and speech-perception studies often rely on spoken stimuli assembled ad hoc for individual experiments, frequently with limited control over the frequency of selected units and incomplete documentation of stimulus properties known to influence perception and processing. Openly available resources that combine curated spoken sublexical recordings with unified, frequency-informed metadata remain scarce. The Minho Spoken Syllable Pool (MSSP) was developed to address this gap for European Portuguese.MethodsMSSP comprises 266 consonant-vowel (CV) syllables recorded under uniform conditions by a single native speaker, using a controlled recording setting and a constant recording chain and environment. Each item was annotated with integrated linguistic descriptors, including IPA and SAMPA transcriptions, segmental and articulatory information, and orthographic mappings. Corpus-derived type and token syllable frequency measures were computed from SUBTLEX-PT, with indices conditioned by word length and syllable position. Stress-related frequency counts were also included, allowing prosodic properties to be considered during stimulus selection. Selection-oriented acoustic descriptors, including syllable duration and F0, were extracted for all items.ResultsThe resulting database provides a controlled set of European Portuguese spoken CV syllables accompanied by unified linguistic, frequency-based, prosodic, and acoustic metadata. The repository includes both raw and edited audio versions, supporting reproducible use across experimental paradigms. The focus on CV syllables reflects their canonical status and widely assumed cross-linguistic prevalence, making the resource suitable not only for European Portuguese research but also for artificial-language learning and statistical-learning paradigms that build controlled streams from natural CV syllables.DiscussionRather than pursuing exhaustive phonetic-acoustic characterization, MSSP prioritizes features that enable principled stimulus screening, comparability across studies, and reproducible experimental design. This is particularly relevant for auditory neuroscience, where syllabic speech sounds are widely used in event-related potential paradigms to examine the neural dynamics of speech perception and segmentation with millisecond precision. MSSP is designed as a controlled experimental resource and may also be useful in clinical or technology-oriented contexts requiring controlled spoken sublexical stimuli.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1815872</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1815872</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Relevance in numbers: accounting for interactional principles when coding and quantifying conversational phenomena]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-15T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Oliver Spiess</author>
        <description><![CDATA[How can interactionality be accounted for when coding and quantifying conversational actions? This article tackles this question by following three methodological steps commonly pursued in mixed method approaches that combine conversation analysis (CA) with quantification. Drawing on empirical examples from a four-year research project on the CA-based quantification of actions in conversational argumentation, it illustrates the practical challenges and solutions developed to address them. The first step, coding, concerns the identification and categorization of interactional phenomena. Five coding rationales are derived from sequential analyses of selected transcripts, showing how coding can be aligned with core interactional principles such as sequentiality, co-constructivity, methodologicality, pragmaticity, and multimodality, thereby producing analytically justified numerators. In the second step, quantification, the article emphasizes the importance of matching coding, research questions, and quantitative methods. Selected results of quantitative analyses are used to discuss which kinds of questions can – and should – be asked in CA-based quantitative studies, based on which denominators are demonstrably relevant to the participants themselves. The third step, interpretation, focuses on making sense of quantitative results. Using selected examples, the article shows how indispensable qualitative post-analyses are for validating, disambiguating, and refining quantitative findings. Overall, the article demonstrates that a crucial part of achieving codability and quantifiability in CA-based research rests on identifying the particular sets of relevancies that guide the organization of the domain at hand. Moreover, the implementation of iterative cycles of hypothesizing, analyzing, and validating is shown to be essential for any quantitative expansion of CA research.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1800266</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1800266</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Co-viewing as a tool to enhance emotional communication in dyads of people living with advanced dementia and their caregivers in long-term care settings]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-15T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Barbara Delacourt</author><author>Antoinette Robilliard</author><author>Rosalie Carignan</author><author>Santiago Hidalgo</author><author>Mohamed Raed El Aoun</author><author>Ana Inés Ansaldo</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionPeople living with advanced dementia experience severe communication deficits, which negatively impact interactions with caregivers, thus contributing to social isolation and decreased quality of life. Previous studies suggest that co-viewing emotionally positive audiovisual content may enhance emotional communication and empathy. This study investigated the effects of film co-viewing on communication between people living with advanced dementia and their caregivers. More specifically, it aimed to identify distinct communication profiles among people living with advanced dementia in long-term care facilities while examining caregivers’ perceptions on the effects of film coviewing communication in persons with advanced dementiaMethodsSeven people living with advanced dementia and four professional caregivers from a long-term care facility participated in co-viewing sessions involving emotionally positive video clips for 20 min, twice a week over three weeks. Dyadic interactions were audiovisually recorded. The verbal and nonverbal communication behaviours of people living with dementia were analysed qualitatively based on their frequency of occurrence. Principal component analyses were conducted to identify communication clusters among people living with dementia. Semi-structured interviews with caregivers were analyzed thematically.ResultsAnalyses revealed marked inter- and intra-individual variability in communication behaviors, highlighting the influence of co-viewing on communication patterns. Three main communication clusters were identified: a gaze-dominant cluster, a facial-expression-dominant cluster, and a speech–gesture hybrid cluster. Caregiver interviews also indicated that co-viewing enhanced communication and elicited shared pleasure within the dyad.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that emotional communication remains possible even in advanced dementia, may be expressed through diverse communicative behaviours, and can be facilitated through shared audiovisual experiences.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1849300</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1849300</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Engagement with opposition: a corpus-based comparative study of Norwegian and Iranian second language learners’ argumentative writing]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-15T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Parichehr Afzali</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Argumentative texts by learners of English may be characterized by potentially unique argumentative characteristics, given their respective backgrounds. A characteristic that may influence their argumentative style is how they engage with opposition through counterarguments. Combining insights from Toulmin’s model of argumentation, Pragma-dialectics and linguistic-stylistic approach, this study investigates 60 texts written by Iranian and Norwegian university students extracted from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLEv3). Using MAXQDA software and a unified annotation scheme, students’ engagement with opposition and patterns in the use of lexical markers when counterarguments are present or absent were investigated, revealing how these choices systematically shape their argumentative style. The findings indicate significant variations withing and across the groups in relation to structural and linguistic engagement with opposition.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1821332</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1821332</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Close-recurrence analysis: a mixed-methods tool for studying joint attention in mobile interaction]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-05-29T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Julie Janssens</author><author>Bert Oben</author><author>Dorien Van De Mieroop</author><author>Geert Brône</author>
        <description><![CDATA[A foundational aspect of social interaction is the phenomenon of joint attention, typically defined as a shared focus between two or more interlocutors on a particular subject, object or event. While joint attention research in the fields of Cognitive Linguistics and psycholinguistics has predominantly relied on task-based interactions in static environments, studies in the tradition of Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis have focused on the sequential-interactional organization of joint attention in unrestrained interaction but have often been limited to smaller datasets. Moreover, existing work has mainly adopted either quantitative methods (in cognitively oriented research) or qualitative approaches (in interactionally oriented studies), whereas mixed-methods analyses of joint attention remain scarce. To address these methodological research gaps, this study draws on a substantial eye-tracking dataset of naturally occurring interactions in a mobile setting (i.c. joint museum visits) and adopts a mixed-methods approach. On the one hand, we apply an established quantitative method for examining gaze behavior in controlled environments, namely cross-recurrence quantification analysis, to the novel context of mobile interactions. On the other hand, we integrate this quantitative perspective with a multimodal conversation analysis to explore the advantages and limitations of combining methods in joint attention research. Specifically, we also propose the idea of a close-recurrence analysis as a visualization technique that repurposes the central logic of cross-recurrence quantification for qualitative analytic work.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1735595</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1735595</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Observation of a third person promotes speaker’s role performance during dyadic communication]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-05-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Shun-ichi Amano</author><author>Ken-ichiro Ogawa</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionNon-verbal information in human face-to-face communication is reflected in physical activities such as eye contact, nodding, and gestures. Research has been conducted to clarify the characteristics of communication by quantitatively measuring time series of physical activity. Most of these studies have focused on clarifying the relationship between social factors and physical activity within dyadic interaction. Therefore, little attention has been paid to the social influence of external actors on dyadic interaction.MethodsIn the present study, we investigated the influence of the presence or absence of observation by a third person who defines roles in physical activity during dyadic communication. Specifically, we conducted an experiment in which a moderator observed dyadic communication between a speaker and a listener, and we analyzed the time-series features of the speaker's head motion during speech.ResultsThe results showed a significant difference between conditions in the number of movement peaks, indicating that third-person observation influenced the overall pattern of head movement. In contrast, frequency-domain analyses of power spectral density revealed no reliable condition differences after controlling for multiple comparisons. Analyses of autoregressive coefficients suggested condition-related differences at specific short time lags.DiscussionTaken together, these findings suggest that third-person observation does not substantially alter the global frequency composition of head movement, but may influence how bodily movement is locally organized over time under socially defined role expectations. This study illustrates how social situations, including observation from a third person, can impose context-dependent constraints on nonverbal communication.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1731835</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1731835</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Does gaze aversion index dispreference or complexity of upcoming answers to questions?]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-04-20T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Peter Auer</author><author>Elisabeth Zima</author>
        <description><![CDATA[What counts as a preferred or dispreferred answer to a question and how can it be recognized? These questions have been widely discussed in conversation analysis in recent years, and some well-established diagnostic features of dispreferred answers have been identified. In this paper, we turn to a less well-established feature: gaze aversion. Kendrick and Holler (2017) have previously suggested that answers to polar questions that invert the question’s polarity are accompanied by gaze aversion to a statistically significant extent. They argue that this gaze aversion indicates the answer’s dispreferred status. We were able to replicate their findings using a large collection of English and German conversational data for polar question-answer sequences. However, we found an even stronger tendency for the answerer to avert their gaze during or after wh-questions, for which, per definition, the concept of preference in terms of polarity matching does not apply. Therefore, we extended the focus of our study to both polar and wh-questions and to alternative concepts of preference: type-conformity and pragmatic preference. Only the latter was found to be associated with gaze aversion in a statistically significant way. Thus, we considered an alternative explanation for answerers’ gaze aversion, also suggested by Kendrick and Holler (2017): answer complexity. Logistic regression analysis revealed that answer complexity, measured by the number of TCUs and absolute length, as well as hesitations, are significant predictors of gaze aversion, while none of the preference types are. These results demonstrate that gaze aversion does not index dispreference so much as it indexes that a complex answer is about to follow.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1832106</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1832106</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Correction: Emergent academic English as a lingua franca in the UAE: in-depth analysis of the ZAEBUC-50 corpus]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-04-16T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Correction</category>
        <author>Víctor Parra-Guinaldo</author>
        <description></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1776373</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1776373</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Emphasis spread in Arabic: evidence from Urban Jordanian Arabic]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-04-09T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Muath Algazo</author><author>Bilal Alsharif</author><author>Rula Abu-Elrob</author><author>Sharif Alghazo</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This study examines emphasis spread (ES) in Urban Jordanian Arabic (UJA), focusing on the phonological and phonetic mechanisms that govern its direction and domain. Emphasis, realized through tongue root retraction, affects both consonants and vowels and can propagate bidirectionally within the phonological word. Using autosegmental phonology, feature geometry, and Optimality Theory (OT), this research identifies coronal emphatics (/tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ/) and the low back vowel /ɑ/ as primary triggers of ES. Moreover, the OT analyses reveal that alignment constraints (L-ALIGN, R-ALIGN V-[dor]) interact with faithfulness constraints (MAXLINK, NOGAP, DEPLINK) to shape the extent and direction of spread. The study provides a unified formal account of intra- and inter-word ES and highlights cross-dialectal variability in Arabic, offering new insights into the phonological representation of emphatic segments. These findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the structural behavior of emphatics in Arabic and support the refinement of theoretical models dealing with feature spreading and secondary articulation. The implications extend to comparative dialectology, phonological theory, and the development of more precise feature-based representations across Semitic languages.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1688492</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1688492</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Managing the reputation of trustworthiness in face-to-face communication]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-02-24T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Manfred Krifka</author>
        <description><![CDATA[One prominent account of the speech act of assertion assumes that by asserting a proposition, the speaker commits to the proposition, that is, vouches for its truth. This predicts negative social effects on the reputation of the speaker, in particular, trustworthiness, or credibility, if the proposition turns out to be false (and conversely, positive effects if it is true). In this paper, I will show that there are modifications to assertive commitments that modulate these social effects, such as evidential or epistemic modifications of the asserted propositions, and strengtheners and weakeners of the commitment itself. I will present the results of such modifications on the trustworthiness of speakers from a rating experiment in German. The article is relevant for the special issue on trustworthiness in science communication, as it argues that markers that relate to trust are relevant to ordinary conversation as well.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1754272</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1754272</link>
        <title><![CDATA[The last word: power, resistance, and interactional authority in courtroom testimony]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-02-20T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Brief Research Report</category>
        <author>Kirsty E. Blewitt</author><author>Sarah E. Duffy</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This article investigates how institutional authority and individual agency are co-constructed in the closing moments of courtroom testimony. Drawing on conversation analysis within a critical-discursive and Foucauldian framework, it examines the final re-cross-examination of Amanda Hayes in State v. Hayes. The analysis shows how question design, timing, and repeated phrasing both sustain and contest power, and how micro-level practices—overlap, repair, and expressions of stance—allow the defendant to momentarily reclaim knowledge and moral authority, even under strict procedural constraints specific to the re-cross-examination phase. By conceptualising authority as a dialogically sustained interactional accomplishment, the study highlights how compliance and resistance make courtroom power visible. These findings demonstrate how language performs and negotiates legitimacy, control, and agency in highly regulated legal interactions. In doing so, the article offers new insight into how institutional talk enacts and contests power at the very moment testimony concludes.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1728758</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1728758</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Perception of emotions across Portuguese varieties]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-02-06T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Diana Santos</author><author>Marisa Cruz</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This study investigates the perception of emotional prosody across two major varieties of Portuguese—Brazilian (BP) and European (EP)—examining how differences in their intonational systems and cultural backgrounds shape emotion recognition. Building on theoretical frameworks of vocal emotion, an experiment was designed using acoustically controlled, acted stimuli expressing neutrality, happiness, sadness, and anger. Native listeners from both varieties completed a perception task measuring identification accuracy and reaction times. Results revealed a clear emotion hierarchy: neutrality and sadness were recognized most accurately and rapidly, whereas happiness and anger were frequently confused, indicating higher perceptual ambiguity. While both listener groups showed a native-variety advantage, EP participants demonstrated superior overall accuracy, attributed to greater exposure to BP media, and more consistent cue reliance. These findings highlight the interplay between universal acoustic cues, variety-specific phonological structuring, and cultural exposure in shaping emotional speech perception. This research contributes to prosodic typology in Portuguese, cross-variety speech perception, and the integration of linguistic and affective models, with implications for phonological theory, applied technologies, and communication in general.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1532750</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1532750</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Emergent academic English as a lingua franca in the UAE: in-depth analysis of the ZAEBUC-50 corpus]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-01-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Víctor Parra-Guinaldo</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Comprehensive morpho-syntactic analyses in the description of English as a lingua franca (ELF) are to date not very common, especially in the Gulf region, and the present paper attempts to remedy this lacuna. Following Parra-Guinaldo and Lanteigne’s (2020) study of morpho-syntactic features of transactional ELF and their classification of linguistic variants into processes and categories, this study provides a qualitative analysis of the morphology and syntax of a selection of 50 writing samples produced by first-year students of English contained in the recently compiled Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC) (Habash and Palfreyman, 2022). The study examines grammatical features by integrating insights from generative grammar and usage-based linguistics and situates them within the context of previous lexico-grammar studies. Based on novel uses of the language identified in the data, the paper posits the emergence of a new variety of ELF within the Gulf region (Gulf English) in that some of the linguistic variants found in the study seem a priori particular to this region. Important observations include the sui generis use of generic forms, morphological reanalysis, anticipatory 3rd person singular -s, phantom pronouns, and intruding constituents. Not only have these processes been identified and classified within the corpus, but plausible motivations behind these have also been hypothesized.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1704484</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1704484</link>
        <title><![CDATA[PhonoMetric: a dual-metric engine for real-time English language accent evaluation and personalized speech training for Indian learners]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-01-05T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Rajkumaran Soundarraj</author><author>Shenbagarajan Anantharajan</author><author>Saranraj Loganathan</author>
        <description><![CDATA[The core objective of this study is to develop a novel method to measure and improve standard spoken English pronunciation accuracy in relation to a desired accent style using current speech processing and information retrieval methods. The system employs the ECAPA-TDNN model, which has been fine-tuned with American-accented speech to create speaker embeddings from the user’s audio. Accent embeddings from reference accent speech samples are subsequently compared using cosine similarity to arrive at an Accent Similarity Score (ASS). At the same time, the user speech is transcribed using the Whisper ASR model (open-source software), then aligned using a forced alignment tool with a reference sentence at the phoneme level. In automatic classification, the level of proficiency (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) is attributed to the users on the basis of semantic and phonetic closeness and measures of comprehensible mistakes. For training, the system utilizes the user’s fluency profile to create a particular YouTube query through SerpAPI, providing related and quality resources for pronunciation, their native and accent gaps being considered. An experimental study was conducted among 30 undergraduate students. Experimental evaluations have shown that our two-metric engine provides a scalable and adaptable solution to real-time accent evaluation with classification accuracy of 91.3, 88.6, and 93.1% across beginner, intermediate, and advanced users, respectively. The system provided a strong negative correlation (r = −0.82) between PER and ASS, while indicating that users received a score of 4.6/5 on satisfaction in initial usability studies.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1655879</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1655879</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Autistic and neurotypical variance in the appraisal of emotional and interoceptive words]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-11-12T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Felipe von Hausen</author><author>María Josefina Larraín-Valenzuela</author><author>Benjamin Carcamo</author><author>Natalia Salgado-Obregon</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionThis study investigates how neurotype influences the emotional appraisal of words.MethodsA total of 131 Spanish-speaking adults in Chile (63 autistic and 68 neurotypical) rated on a 7-point Likert scale 238 Spanish nouns across six affective dimensions: (a) valence, (b) arousal, (c) subjective frequency, (d) association with depression, (e) association with anxiety, and (f) association with anger. Descriptive statistics and Principal Component Analysis were used to identify differences in lexical-affective ratings.ResultsThe results revealed consistent group differences in the emotional interpretation of words. Autistic participants tended to assign higher ratings to emotionally intense, concrete, and interoceptively salient terms, particularly those linked to bodily sensations, anxiety, or arousal. Words such as inquietud (uneasiness), ducha (shower), and ansia (craving) were rated as systematically more emotionally charged by autistic participants. In contrast, neurotypical participants favored abstract, socially embedded terms like admiración (admiration), soledad (loneliness), and decepción (disappointment), which rely more heavily on symbolic inference and social scripts. These differences were especially marked in the anxiety and arousal dimensions. Modeling results further confirmed that neurotype predicted systematic variation in ratings across all dimensions, suggesting distinct cognitive-emotional frameworks.DiscussionThe findings support the hypothesis that autistic and neurotypical individuals construct emotional meaning through different experiential systems: one grounded in interoception and perceptual salience, and the other guided by social abstraction. These insights offer implications for inclusive pedagogy, clinical communication, and the design of affective tools in education and therapy. Recognizing neurotype-specific emotional semantics may help reduce miscommunication and foster more adaptive and respectful forms of interaction across neurodivergent and neurotypical populations.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1696818</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1696818</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Enhancing transparency in source domain disambiguation for metaphor analysis: a cross-lingual approach integrating lexical resources, word embeddings, and human annotation]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-11-06T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Mojca Brglez</author><author>Kristina Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Contemporary cognitive-linguistic research often seeks to consolidate metaphorical expressions into systematic mappings between source and target domains. However, the formulation of such mappings in natural language remains insufficiently systematized, frequently relying on intuition or on lexical resources that are not available for all languages. In this study, we propose a systematic, semi-automatic approach to source domain identification that enhances transparency, objectivity, and replicability in metaphor analysis while reducing annotator reliance on intuition. We build on an established semantic ontology, bilingual lexical resources, and distributional semantic representations to assign semantic domains to words, which serve as proxies for conceptual source domains. We manually validate the data and quantitatively evaluate the method via automatic metrics. Furthermore, we perform a qualitative evaluation of annotation disagreements and a detailed error analysis. Results indicate that the approach provides a promising foundation for semantic tagging and metaphor analysis in Slovene. The qualitative analysis of disagreements demonstrates how individual linguistic variation and cognitive biases influence domain attribution, and often prevent reaching a complete consensus between annotators. The error analysis further identifies specific limitations of the proposed approach, which arise from gaps in lexical resources and from the inherent properties of distributional semantic modeling. Overall, the findings underscore both the methodological challenges of automatic domain attribution and the cognitive complexity of source domain mapping in metaphor analysis.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1583494</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1583494</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Insights from think-alouds on how multilingual learners engage in translanguaging in a multilingual science assessment]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-10-31T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Alexis A. López</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This study aims to explore how multilingual learners utilize their linguistic and semiotic resources to engage in and complete a digital multilingual science assessment. A bilingual science task, accompanied by bilingual accommodations, was designed to allow students to use all their language and semiotic resources to demonstrate their understanding of the different states of matter. I employed a think-aloud method, incorporating both concurrent and retrospective protocols, to guide 15 middle school students in articulating their thoughts during the multilingual science assessment. This approach aimed to uncover how they utilized their linguistic and semiotic resources and the reasoning behind their selection of specific resources. The findings from this study provide insights into the cognitive processes and decision-making strategies of multilingual learners regarding the selection of language and semiotic resources in a multilingual content assessment. Additionally, implications for designing multilingual content assessments are also discussed.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1657464</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1657464</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Emotionally responsive regulatory practices in FLL counseling and their evolving dynamics in interaction]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-10-31T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Milica Lazović</author>
        <description><![CDATA[In foreign language learning (FLL) advisory interactions, emotional responsiveness emerges as a central dimension, sustained through regulatory practices such as reappraisal, relabeling, self-disclosures, and simulated self-talk. Despite their importance, little is known about how novices without training in emotional regulation respond to learners' explicit negative emotional displays in contexts where emotions are backgrounded, generating tension in emotional reciprocity. This study examines the interactions of 28 pre-service teachers acting as FLL advisors for 28 international students in a service-learning context across two semesters. Data include audio recordings of 14 ad hoc advisory sessions and 14 seven-session counseling cycles, supplemented by team meetings. Using an interactional-linguistic approach, the study examines the linguistic resources that underlie emotional responsiveness and regulatory practices, focusing on their interplay and adaptive use across various interactions. Findings reveal a cluster of emotional-regulative practices along a continuum of increasing explicitness, complexity, and multidimensionality: emotional-regulative noticing, positive reorienting reappraisal in follow-up questions, emotionally supportive co-reasoning, transformative co-reasoning, postponed regulatory processing, extended meta-emotional episodes, and orchestrating multidimensional reappraisal in joint reasoning. All practices involve unpacking emotional displays into situated, narratively structured co-experiences, making them processable within the interactional interface of co-reasoning. Emotional responsiveness evolves dynamically across the counseling cycle, showing increased explicitness, functional recalibration, and argumentative integration, while context-dependent variations reflect advisors' adaptivity to the interactional history. The study highlights the need for systematic conceptualization of emotional responsiveness as a professional competency, providing a foundation for research on adaptive interpersonal regulation and emotionally responsive advising in FLL.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1537384</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1537384</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Tackling the challenge of construct validity in assessing newly arrived learners’ receptive skills: investigations on a multilingual online-based diagnostic tool]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-10-16T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Christoph Gantefort</author><author>Teresa Barberio</author><author>Lukas Busch</author><author>Evghenia Goltsev</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionThis study presents the theoretical rationale and first empirical findings on Allrad-M, a newly developed multilingual procedure for the assessment of receptive linguistic skills. The tool is designed to enhance test fairness and construct validity when evaluating newly arrived learners’ listening and reading comprehension. Unlike monolingual diagnostic instruments, Allrad-M enables learners to switch flexibly between German, Ukrainian, Russian, and English, allowing for a more accurate assessment of comprehension skills regardless of their proficiency in German as a second language.MethodsThe exploratory study is based on two data sources. First, ten screen recordings of learners’ interactions with Allrad-Mwere analyzed to examine how participants used their linguistic repertoires when processing texts and responding to test items. Second, a semi-structured interview was conducted with a teacher who implemented the tool in classroom practice, providing professional insights into its diagnostic potential.ResultsThe analysis of the screen recordings shows that learners actively mobilized their multilingual resources while working with the tool. Language choices were shaped by context (reception vs. assessment) and modality (reading vs. listening). Case analyses further highlight individual strategies in the use of multiple languages. The teacher interview indicates that Allrad-M reveals aspects of learners’ potential that often remain undetected in monolingual assessments.DiscussionThe findings suggest that Allrad-M can strengthen formative assessment practices for newly arrived learners by recognizing multilingual repertoires as resources rather than obstacles. Future development should focus on integrating additional languages and providing targeted teacher training to support the implementation of multilingual diagnostic tools.]]></description>
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