Fluency - Science topic

To make postgraduate medical specialty examinations more accessible to neurodiverse candidates, the focus should be on clarity, explicitness, and structured question design. Using plain language and eliminating ambiguity can help ensure that key diagnostic features are clearly stated, reducing the risk of misinterpretation. Long, complex sentences should be avoided to minimize cognitive load, and key information should be highlighted using bold or underlining. In multiple-choice questions (MCQs), answer choices should be distinctly different to prevent confusion, and key clinical features should be emphasized to avoid candidates selecting the "second-best" option due to misplaced emphasis. Short-answer questions should include structured prompts to guide thought processes, and stepwise reasoning should be encouraged to aid candidates with executive function difficulties. To address the challenge of illness scripts, explicit clinical contexts should be provided, and alternative formats like flowcharts or visual aids can help candidates process information more effectively. Examinations should also reduce reliance on Theory of Mind skills, ensuring that social assumptions and implicit reasoning are minimized. Additionally, accommodations such as extra time, alternative formats, or audio-based questions can help level the playing field. By making these adjustments, assessments can focus on testing medical competency rather than linguistic fluency or implicit reasoning skills, ultimately creating a fairer and more inclusive evaluation process for all candidates.

To build an AI creativity evaluation model, a large dataset of original participant texts and corresponding creativity ratings is crucial for training, ensuring generalization, validating performance, and capturing qualitative nuances like originality and complexity. If data is scarce, crowdsourcing or collaborating with institutions can help acquire the necessary information.

I dont the age of your subjects or the purpose, tools vary depending on the purpose.

probably the following tools may help

1. Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency-Second Edition-TOSWRF-2

2. test of silent reading efficiency and comprehension-TOSREC

along wiht phonemic awareness/ phonological awareness tests and reading comprehension tests may be helpful too.

Informal assessments are advisable too, checking accuracy, speed and prosody.

Good luck

you may get info at

Humans learn language naturally through social interaction, feedback, and immersive experiences. They adapt their language use over time based on a variety of social and contextual factors. AI learns from pre-existing datasets and requires retraining with new data to improve or adapt its language skills. It lacks the innate ability to learn and adapt in real-time through social interaction.

To avoid all the above-mentioned issues stated, I recommend using the Natural Approach (Stephen Krashen, 1981) teaching approaches/methodologies/strategies/techniques; cooperative learning; collaborative learning, outdoor education learning, etc. wherein students work in groups and collaborate each other in learning and teaching both contents and ESL classes. Voice of experience.

Hello everyone,

While AI has the potential to match human intelligence in various ways, the true extent of its capabilities will largely depend on advancements in quantum computing. Human intelligence encompasses not only factual knowledge but also creativity, emotional understanding, and intuition—qualities that current AI models can mimic but not fully replicate. While computers excel at memory and data processing, humans uniquely apply imagination and intuition to novel situations. The concept of ‘artificial general intelligence’ aims to create machines that surpass human abilities, but achieving this remains an ongoing challenge.

Some ideas and associations:

You state “human can only aspire to fluency in so many different languages before mixing up words due to code switching”. I don’t know if this is true at all. On what research is it based? In my own situation, I am fluent in 5 languages and do not mix up words or get confused to which language a word belongs to.

Fluency in language corresponds to numeracy, that has been demonstrated. Children who are read a lot of stories in pre-school, for example, were no better in general subjects compared to other children, but they were better at maths later on. Both implicate logical thinking. Without logical thinking humans cannot string words into a longer narrative either.

People choosing coding or computer sciences may prefer to work individually and not in groups. That is a different dynamic, social vs solo, than proficiency at languages.

Here are python and MATLAB scripts to calculate weighted correlation coefficients using a method published by Pozzi et al 2012 (DOI:10.1140/epjb/e2012-20697-x): https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/158261-weightedcorrs-weighted-correlation-and-covariance

Sure, the focus study helps to find many special points of Strength in the language.

In my opinion, the number of languages a person can speak fluently without forgetting can vary depending on various factors, including individual aptitude, learning strategies, exposure, and practice. While there is no fixed limit, some individuals have demonstrated the ability to fluently speak multiple languages.

Hello!

The forced aligners (and there are great ones) do (semi-)automatic segmentation of phonetic segments, syllables, words and so.

To automatically calculate parameters such as '1', '2' and '3' you wrote, for example, you would probably need scripts or functions (in Praat, R, Python etc.) dedicated for that.

Here is a script to run from Praat: <https://github.com/leonidasjr/SpeechRhythmCode>. This script takes speech rate and plenty of other prosodic parameters as well as some of the other meassures you mentioned.

I hope it helps.

Good luck!

Dear Mee-Jee Kim,

You can find answers to your questions about speech and articulation rates in our study: https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1200953 When measuring these parameters, it is very important which time you will refer to as the pause time (e.g., pauses short than 250 Ms for articulation rate).

Good luck.

ELAN would be the program that you can use to annotate/ transcribe the audio/video recordings.

It will also allow you to carry out acoustic analysis using 'praat'. In praat you can mark pauses and calculate duration of each pause and then average it out.

in ELAN when you transcribe, you can calculate, no of words/ min or no of syllables/min ..both are measures of rate of speech.

Dear Emma,

I think the following article might be of help. Although most articles on the topic I came across are focused on animals and fruits, the following one includes clothes as well.

Kind regards

TED talk is an excellent tool for improving listening skills, but also for speaking and reading comprehension. For example: your students listen to the video once and you check their comprehension by some of the questions that are offered below the video (this is possible for edTED) or you can add your own questions. In this way you check listening comprehension and simultaneously studentsbpractice speaking. Thirdly all videos offers transcript that can be reread (helping reading skills) and later an interesting points/paragraphs can be discussed or translated or you can work on certain terms and add vocabulary exercise for that terms etc.

Items that are loaded with affect (emotions) such as satisfaction tends to be highly subjectivea s you might want to compare error rates and and power when analysing the Likert scale. As you are attempting to quantify perceived efficacy and the numbered measures are ordinal ,this might have some statistical violation issues.You may want to use visual analog scales (VAS) instead. VAS measures a characteristic/ attitude across a continuum of values which cannot easily be directly measured, which can give you better and accurate results.Caution should be exercised with regards to statistical power and type 1/2 errors.Good luck.

BBC and CNN provide english learning environment for listeners

I measure repair fluency using the number of repairs/pauses etc per minute. Hope that helps!

Richard,

Hello, we have the option of F2F but the restrictions put in to place seemed almost impossible for language classes. It will be all online zoom again. I am actually satisfied with this course of action. From 10/1 classes begin. I will have all my classes from the uni and my office this time. I taught from home last semester and it was not as grand as expected. Issues with noise; dog, cars, etc, and connectivity; such as the fact that there are 5 people in our house now. Our daughter is home taking online classes along with my son and his wife who are heavy Internet users. I'll commute to school but actually easier in may ways.

Following.

My pleasure.

Yes.personalities have an important role in language acquisition. in my opinion each personality needs an especial learning style.

Maybe you could try to show if there is a significant correlation between the number of time the student did the task and the improvement ? Given your data don't seems to show a normal distribution, I did a Spearman correlation test (Spearman's rank correlation rho; Alternative :two.sided), and it shows a significant strong to moderate correlation (p=0.0132, r=0.5436).

If you use the software R, you can try it by testing this line of data :

m=matrix(c(29,6,27,11.8,22,5.31,22,17.13,21,18.02,19,16.725,16,3.94,14,14.29,13,1.89,12,-1.03,10,4.7,0,1,0,1.83,0,6.72,0,2.57,0,-2.07,0,4.8,0,6,0,-2.61,0,8.2),20,2, byrow=TRUE) cor.test(m[,1], m[,2], method="spearman")

I'm really not an expert in statistics, so I might be totally wrong, but it could be a way to present your datas.

Hi there,

It may not be the BEST answer; however, I will try to provide you with my suggestion. I hope it will help.

Hello Yara,

I agree with Eliana Ibrahimi , but you should realize that this comparison will not have very good statistical power to detect differences, unless those differences are very large. The reason is the small number of cases per group (sample size).

Good luck with your work.

Thanks for your reply! It looks like they were looking for a justification for either using or discarding the adjusted measures. As the majority of L1 and L2 fluency measures were weakly correlated, and my participants scored lower on proficiency tests than expected (L1 and L2 are usually more strongly related for upper intermediate/high proficiency), I think I can justify not using L1-adjusted measures for the remainder of the study/research questions related to individual differences.

Creativity is a thrill (emotional energy, an internal “drug”) from novelty, originality, uniqueness, perfection ... perfection in reproducing complexity (for example, in music, in conquering mountain peaks)

Each language has its own rules, for example, Arabic language is written from right to left and vice versa in English language

Best Regards Holly B. F. Warren

Dear Jim,

It is true that originality (or novelty) is a common criterion in most definitions of creativity. However, fluency, originality, and flexibility as scores on divergent thinking tests (DTT) are not indices or elements of creativity per se. In the context of the measurement, these indices should be primarily considered as facets of divergent thinking (DT). DTT are not direct measures of creativity, but they are useful instruments in measuring creative potential (see Runco, 2008; Runco & Acar, 2012).

As to your confusion, it is true that sometimes researches rely only on one specific dimension of DT (e.g., fluency). It indeed causes problems because in such cases the measurement lacks validity due to low differentiation between fluency in DTT and verbal fluency (from Thurstone's model of intelligence).

Why do researchers sometimes rely only on fluency? I think that there may be several consideration about the issue. First, this choice may be determined by specific research questions: researchers are interested only in one score (e.g., fluency or originality). I admit that this situation is highly hypothetical, but it is theoretically possible.

Second, sometimes some dimensions of DT are not calculated because they are considered as redundant. For example, flexibility is not computed in the figural form of Torrance's Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) because it was shown that flexivility highly correlates with fluency (Hebert et al., 2002).

Third, it is true that fluency, originality, and flexibility are highly correlated in DTT, and some researcher prefer to use only one of them. Then, why fluency is chosen as a signle score and not originality or flexibility? I think that the choice is determined by the inner voice of objectivity that is usually warranted in scientific research. Perhaps, fluency is seen as more objective measure (number of suggested responses) while originality and flexibility are more vulnerable to subjective bias. Runco (2010, p. 425) comments this in the following way:

"Another kind of discriminant validity involves the various indices of DT (e.g., fluency, originality, flexibility, and elaboration). On the one hand, three lines of investigation bring the discrimination of the various indices into question. First are the factor analyses of DT test scores that often uncover only one factor. Then there are multitrait/multimethod comparisons that suggest that scores within any one method (i.e., one test) are more highly correlated than indices (traits) across tests. And there are the simple product moment correlations, which also suggest redundancy, especially between fluency and originality, and between fluency and flexibility. For these three reasons it has been said that fluency might be used alone. After all, it predicts originality and flexibility."

However, it is worth mentioning that the differentiality of indeces may to some extent depend on testing conditions (e.g., instructions). For instance, "be fluent" instruction stresses that participant should generate many ideas and, thus, the fluency is more congruent with this instruction. But "be creative" instruction lay emphasis on producing highly original ideas and, thus, the originality is more congruent with this instruction (see further detailes in a wonderful review of Reiter-Palmon, Forthmann, & Barbot, 2019). Thus, you should pay attention to the instructions that are used with DTT. Nusbaum, Silvia, and Beaty (2014) argued that the application of "be creative" instruction is a methodological necessity for DT assessment. How do I know which instructions were used if it is not reported? You may look at correlation matrix and find the correlation coefficient between fluency and originality. If the correlation is positive and varies from medium to high, then the "be fluent" instruction was used. If the correlation is close to zero or negative, then it is more probable that the "be creative" instruction was used.

Another concern is of confounding effect of fluency on originality. This problem was intensively investigated since late 70s. For example, Hocevar stated that the value of 82% correlation coefficients (N = 89) between fluency and originality exceeded the value 0.5, whereas the average value was 0.69 (Hocevar, 1979). Further, in the reanalysis of Wallach and Kogan (1965), Silvia found that the correlation between fluency and originality was 0.89 (Silvia, 2008). Curiously, in the analysis of the longitudinal study initiated under the guidance of E. P. Torrance, the correlations between the indices of fluency, flexibility, and originality vary in the moderate range (0.39 < r < 0.67), which rather confirms their relative independence from each other (Runco et al., 2010). In the study of Dumas and Dunbar, the latent variable approach was used to study the relationship between fluency and originality (Dumas & Dunbar, 2014). Fluency was determined by counting the total number of ideas, and originality was calculated using the method of latent semantic analysis (LSA). As a result, it was demonstrated that fluency and originality modeled as latent variables correlated with each other only at a moderate level (r = 0.38). This study allows us to suggest that the level of relationship between the variables of fluency and originality may vary depending on the method of modeling the variables. For further interesting details you can look at following works: Runco, Okuda, & Thurston (1987); Plucker & Runco (1998); Snyder et al. (2004). And of course you should consult the recent work of Forthmann, Szardenings, and Holling (2018).

I think that the best way to end is to refer again to the insightful remark from Mark Runco (2010, pp. 425-426):

"The use of only one index of DT is unfortunate on several grounds. First and least important, if only one index were to be used for some reason, fluency is probably not the best one. As noted above, originality is more strongly tied to creativity than is fluency, so if one index were to be used alone, it should probably be originality. Additionally, there is experimental evidence that the indices are independent and represent independent processes. Runco (1985), for example, demonstrated that explicit instructions to be flexible do not necessarily lead to high originality scores, and this fact suggests a kind of operational independence. Similarly, when explicitly directed to be original, fluency scores tend to drop (Harrington, 1975; Runco, 1986). A change in one index, in one direction, accompanied by a change in the opposite direction in another index, would not occur if they were interdependent. In addition, the correlations between fluency and originality or fluency and flexibility are large but not perfect. Hence, there is unique variance, even if it is smaller than that which is shared. Finally, regression techniques have removed variance shared by fluency and originality, allowing the reliability of the unique variance of originality (or flexibility) to be examined (Hocevar, 1980; Runco & Albert, 1985). The unique variance of originality is reliable, at least in some tests and individuals, at moderate or high levels of talent."

I hope this materials will help you!

Best regards,

Kirill

I would contact Dr. Okim Kang at Northern Arizona University. She has written an excellent article on these measures of fluency:

Suprasegmental Measures of Accentedness and Judgments of Language Learner Proficiency in Oral English.

OKIM KANG, DON RUBIN and LUCY PICKERING

The Modern Language Journal

Vol. 94, No. 4 (Winter 2010), pp. 554-566

Right now she may be quite busy, though, planning the next Pronunciation in Second Language Learning & Teaching Conference at her university. If you can go to this conference, it would be worth your while.

I guess using seduction in images and objects to sell things people don't need about...

Dear Dr Carroll,

Thank you too for your answer. I think Hobos will be our choice.

Thank you for your recommendation about the waterproof shuttle, i also think it will be a great help in the field (time/energy/efficiency).

Best wishes

No problem. Although rather than increasing media volume or frequency of changes i would try to decrease the density. You can always try a pilot study which does not include all your variables but is good enough to give you info. You can even try a calibration curve with different densities and monitor the confluency. This will be useful to see when is the limit your cells can afford in terms of confluence and detaching

good luck !

Hi! We used Rorschach tables as stimuli to evaluate "visual fluency". The participants were asked to name as many different things they can see in the ambiguous picture for each table. The consistency/test-retest reliability was very high. Best, M.

I agree. There's no way to tell whether or not they're made up.

Yours truly,

Fazinio Fiffelfarf

Thanks Thomas. Yes the fluid contain bile salts. Is this may happened by contamination?

Good afternoon, you should look up some researches about strenghen verbal fluency and writing through reading stories for children and possible thematic units based on them.

What sort of methodologies or strategies would you like to use to improve verbal fluency and writing?

Here is an oral proficiency rubric my colleagues and I have used.  It is theory-based and has been used in a peer-reviewed publication, so it is citable.

 Hello Laszlo Karpati,

The following journals can hopefully provide you with  more linguistically oriented journals addressing your purpose :

1) Language Learning Journal from Elsevier ,

2) Language Teaching , Practice and Critique from Emerald publications , and

3) Journal of Psycholinguistic Research from Springer.

Best of luck,

R. Biria

Dear Renato,

Thanks a lot, that is really helpful!

Katrina

I concur with my colleagues, but want to add a caution that in order to compare different measures, you need to make sure that the respective scales of measurement are compatible with one another. Likewise, consider whether the scores yielded by the various measures have similar psychometric properties. It is not advisable to compare  standard scores  with t scores , for example. If  the scores used for the various measures  feature different psychometric   properties, consider standardizing them. 

O’Keeffe, B.V., Slocum, T.A., Burlingame, C., Snyder, K., & Bundock, K. (2012). Comparing results of systematic reviews: Parallel reviews of research on repeated reading. Education & Treatment of Children, 35(2), 333 – 366.

General or more precise measures are related to the research object but what I find interesting to remember is that written language is always precise and revised in the moment we write and those aspects affects fluency. 

There are thousands of articles about multilingualism. I would start with the chapter on the subject in a Psychology of Language textbook, if you haven't already learned the basics. Depending on how much reading you've already done, you might want to read other parts on how the mind comprehends language for meaning.

This is because you will find that the major emphasis in research on how people who know more than one language starts off with the general premise that understanding any particular language is very similar regardless of which language. So the fundamental questions research on multilingualism is "what is different about knowing two or three languages compared to one?".

So if we have a person who only knows English, and another person who only knows Chinese, the general trend of research shows that both people have similar ways of understanding their one language, whether it is English or Chinese. The one language will be used to access the mind's memory for concepts to permit understanding of the language when listening or reading. When speaking or writing, your language will be used to form the structure that holds the information from your conceptual memory so that you can express it in a way that will others will understand.

Your questions lead directly to the major issue in research on multilingualism. If a person knows two languages, is one language dominant? This means that the dominant language is the language that has a direct connection to your conceptual memory. When you are using one of the other non-dominant languages, your mind would translate the non-dominant language into your dominant language, and you would use that translation to connect to your conceptual memory.

The alternative theory is that it is possible that there might be no dominant language. In this situation, a bilingual person would be able to directly connect to their conceptual memory with either language, and no translation step is needed.

The other major issues come from this question. So there is research investigating whether a person's age affects whether they will have a dominant language or whether they will have equal understanding of both languages. Similarly, the amount of time spent using a language is one related to age, but not the same. What type of language use you spend your time doing matters, as with any single language. Conversations are different than reading and both are different than writing. It could be possible that a person could have equally strong skills with two languages in conversations but has to mentally translate to read or write from one language into the other.

Even the question of whether knowing a language shapes thoughts in a unique way can fit into this framework. The question would be whether there are some concepts in memory that can only be linked to one language and not the other.

One important factor to keep in mind is that the basic position may not be as valid as historically considered. That is, there may be important differences between languages that affect memory and language comprehension, so that some things are perhaps easier or harder within a certain language or group of languages.

Historically, much of the research on language comprehension has involved European languages. More specifically, much of the research has involved European languages from the Germanic and Romance groups. This is because most of the professional scholars of language have been western Europeans or North Americans at universities in western Europe or North America. But in recent decades, the amount and quality of research conducted on major Asian languages has vastly increased. Researchers in China are studying Chinese. But there are also enough students and faculty who know Chinese in places like New York that research there can focus on Chinese as well.

Even with advances in research on Asian languages, especially those of east Asia, most of the languages in the world go without much research into them. The research that exists often is from anthropology rather than psychology, and that comes with important differences in terms of the ability to break down language into small units of time or content. Many of these languages also have very few speakers and are found in places that are difficult to get to, with heavy forests or mountains or desert environments and little connection to the world beyond the local area.

But the main question remains the same, what is the relationship between language and conceptual memory, and how is this relationship affected by knowing more than one language?

I do not get the problem> Are you saying that someone published an article in your name? If that is right, I would suggest you write to the editor of the journal so they can publish an ERRATUM in the journal to correct the problem. It could very well be that the correct authors have raised the problem, that is if my understanding is correct.

there is the recent accepted Manuscript - 2014 - Journal of Fluency Disorders

The effectiveness of stuttering treatments in Germany

Authors: Harald A. Euler,  Benjamin P. Lange, Sascha

Schroeder & Katrin Neumann

SRIM reports concentrations in units of [cm^-3]/[cm^-2].  If you multiply these units by the experimental fluence in [ion.cm^-2] you recover the (ion, vacancy, etc) concentration for that fluence.  As noted earlier, the concentrations scale with fluence so if you double the fluence the concentration will also double.

For neutron fluence, you need to know the primary knock on atom (PKA) spectum as input to SRIM. PKA spectra per neutron can be obtained from NJOY. Check out my recent work for further details. http://www.kns.org/jknsfile/v46/3-13-51.pdf

You can measure this in Praat, which is free software located here: www.praat.org. Nivja de Jong has worked extensively with fluency measures pauses and has a script for automatic measures of pauses, speech/articulation rates). Here is the relevant webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/speechrate/

I am doing the verbal fluency task (one with first letter 'f' and one with 'name all animals you can in 60 seconds') as part of one of my studies, and verbal fluency assesses some elements of executive functioning.

Read the book Grammar, OUP (1994) Rob Batstone. The book is about teaching gramar as a skill so the student can integrate it directly into his/her language development.