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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>2026-05-07T08:00:06.365+00:00</pubDate>
        <ttl>60</ttl>
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        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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>
      </item><item>
        <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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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1569313</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1569313</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Looking inside the black box—semantic investigations on a frequently used expression beyond AI]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-09-05T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Patrizia Attar</author><author>Franziska Buresch</author><author>Anna Köhler</author><author>Monika Hanauska</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a black box is a current phenomenon in scientific communication as well as in journalistic reporting on this topic. Yet, for several years we can observe an increasing use of the expression black box in further contexts like economics or politics not related to AI. This leads to the question of which aspects of meaning are associated with the expression and how the respective context of use might influence the constitution of the specific semantic features. Furthermore, it raises the question, which evaluative features accompany the expression as this might have an impact on the perception of the entity referred to as a black box. In our paper, we investigate these questions based on 288 contemporary articles from German speaking journalistic publications. Our method combines a qualitative content analysis with approaches from semantic theory of use and discourse semantics. The results indicate that the expression black box has developed a wide range of supplementary semantic features as lack of knowledge, uncertainty or (lack of) traceability through the use in varied contexts such as economics, politics or biochemical processes. This shapes the conceptualization of the term black box in contemporary language use, which also affects the conceptualization of AI in return whenever it is referred to as a black box.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1523083</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1523083</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Bridging the digital disability divide: supporting digital participation of individuals with speech, language, and communication disorders as a task for speech-language pathology]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-07-23T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Perspective</category>
        <author>Dennis Thorndahl</author><author>Miriam Abel</author><author>Katharina Albrecht</author><author>Anna Rosenkranz</author><author>Kristina Jonas</author>
        <description><![CDATA[PurposeThe goal of speech-language pathology is to ensure and improve the participation of individuals with speech, language, and communication disorders. Continued digital transformation means more participation occurs through digital media, raising questions about the digital participation of these individuals and the role, content, and framework of speech-language pathology, both of which need proactive discussion. This Perspective Article outlines a viewpoint on these developments, aiming to stimulate critical reflection and disciplinary dialog on the future role of speech-language pathology in the digital age.ConclusionResearch indicates that individuals with speech, language, and communication disorders are restricted in their digital participation. There is a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding the impact of various speech, language and communication skills on digital participation across different disorders. If speech-language pathology aims to promote participation and this is increasingly dependent on digital media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) then digital participation must also be a therapeutic goal. Achieving this requires more (participatory) research and corresponding training opportunities for speech language pathologists (SLPs).]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1592994</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1592994</link>
        <title><![CDATA[The sound of complaints]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-07-22T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Maël Mauchand</author><author>Marc D. Pell</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Complaining is a social act in which a speaker often verbally conveys feelings of suffering to gain empathy from listeners. The present study investigated the acoustic profile of complaints to identify which prosodic features are used in this context and to explore differences in their cultural expression in two variants of French. A stimulus set composed of 336 complaints and 336 prosodically neutral utterances produced by two cultural groups, French and Québécois (French-Canadian), was analyzed along 15 acoustic parameters. Utterances were also judged by listeners to determine whether complaints were perceptually associated with particular emotional characteristics. Relative to neutral statements, complaints displayed increases in fundamental frequency (mean, variability, and range), loudness, and high-frequency energy, and several rhythmic modulations. Complaints were also characterized by systematic changes in parameters related to voice quality and increased vocal control (decreased shimmer, increased harmonics-to-noise ratio), which could exemplify the speaker’s strategic use of emotive cues. Perceptually, complaining voices were most associated with sadness, anger, and surprise. Complaints produced by French and Québécois speakers demonstrated shared central tendencies but also differed both acoustically and perceptually. Our results provide new insights into the acoustic and perceptual profiles of emotive “complaining” speech patterns meant to elicit empathy in social interactions.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1598041</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1598041</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Reframing China in U.S. Trade policy discourse: a context-deictic space model for ideological positioning]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-07-21T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Ying Hu</author><author>Hongfei Li</author>
        <description><![CDATA[U.S.-China trade tensions have reshaped global economic relations and produced a discursive struggle over identity, threat, and legitimacy. While research in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Cognitive Linguistics (CCL) has examined ideological framing, few studies have systematically modeled how diplomatic discourse constructs shifting representations over time. This study proposes the Context-Deictic Space Model (CDSM), a socio-cognitive framework integrating van Dijk’s Context Model with Chilton’s Deictic Space Theory. By mapping participants, settings, and events onto spatial, temporal, and axiological axes, CDSM visualizes ideological positioning in discourse. Applied to three U.S. trade policy agendas (2017–2019), the analysis shows how China is reframed from a distant trade partner to a proximate adversary, invoking crisis and legitimizing protectionism while marginalizing actors like the World Trade Organization (WTO). Theoretically, the study extends CCL by offering a visualizable model of ideological distance; empirically, it provides a new lens for analyzing threat construction in political discourse.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1470869</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1470869</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Clinical feasibility of a play-based assessment of motor speech disorders in young children in Austria]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-07-10T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Gertraud Erlacher</author><author>Shelley L. Velleman</author><author>Daniel Holzinger</author>
        <description><![CDATA[BackgroundThere is a lack of valid measures for the differential diagnosis of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) worldwide, especially ones that are suitable for young children. With newly developed assessments, one key question is their feasibility in a community clinical setting.AimThe aim of this study is to examine the feasibility of a play-based tool to assess CAS, using the “Language-Neutral Assessment of Motor Speech” (LAMS) as an example, trialing it for the first time in a German-speaking region.MethodsThis exploratory study is conducted as a series of single case descriptions (N = 7) with monolingual German-speaking children. The feasibility aspects of practicality, acceptance, and adaptation are examined. The collected data are processed solely descriptively with additional qualitative observations.ResultsThe practicality of a complete administration of the LAMS in a clinical setting is limited because it is time-consuming; however, acceptance by children and caregivers is high for most parts of the test. Adaptations to economize the time investment (primarily by omitting video analysis) seem possible without a significant reduction of quality.Conclusions and clinical implicationsImplementation of a flexible, playful assessment, such as the LAMS, in local clinical settings looks promising. In German-speaking countries, a German adaptation of the LAMS could fill a gap in the assessment of motor speech disorders in young, hard-to-test children. More data regarding reliability and validity are needed.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1558540</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1558540</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Prosodic cue use for identifying interrogative and declarative structures with wide and narrow focus in individuals with and without aphasia]]></title>
        <pubdate>2025-07-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Kathleen Schneider</author><author>Outi Tuomainen</author><author>Isabell Wartenburger</author><author>Sandra Hanne</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionProsody plays a critical role in linguistic processing at both sentential and information-structural levels, while prosodic impairments in individuals with aphasia can lead to difficulties in sentence comprehension and everyday communication. Despite its importance, prosodic processing in aphasia and its relationship to inter-individual variability within this highly heterogeneous population remain underexplored. This study examined prosodic cue use for structural prediction in individuals with and without aphasia, exploring individual differences in prosodic impairments.MethodsSixteen individuals with aphasia and thirty neurotypical control participants completed a sentence type identification task using string-identical (i.e., structurally ambiguous) German sentences (interrogative vs. declarative) presented under two focus conditions (wide vs. narrow). Response accuracy and reaction times were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. To explore variability among individuals with aphasia, a clustering analysis was conducted based on task performance.ResultsIndividuals with aphasia demonstrated significant difficulties in prosodic processing, particularly in identifying questions under wide focus conditions. Wide focus posed challenges for structural prediction due to deficient prosodic cue use, while narrow focus facilitated task performance by providing more salient prosodic cues. The level of speech fluency and abilities in global pitch detection emerged as potential sources of variability. Clustering analysis identified distinct subgroups of individuals with aphasia, each of which was characterized by unique patterns of task performance, suggesting differential underlying mechanisms potentially linked to cognitive abilities and overall processing demands.DiscussionThese findings emphasize challenges and resources of prosodic cue use for structural prediction, advancing the understanding of prosodic impairments and their effects on communication. This study underscores the importance of considering individual differences in prosodic processing for developing targeted diagnostic tools and therapeutic approaches tailored to the needs of individuals with aphasia.]]></description>
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