In fact students have already received almost totally grammatical rules during their several years study, but they often lack of the ability to actually use English and to understand the use in normal intercultural communication. Misunderstandings caused by cultural differences have involved them frequently in intercultural miscommunication. The purpose of this paper is to present the concept o...

In recent years, increasing emphasis has been put on pragmatic competence as part of foreign language curricula. This article analyzes the devices used by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in order to perform the speech act of disagreement in their L2. Data from 27 ESL learners were gathered by means of Discourse Completion Tests and compared to baseline data from 27 native speaker...

The prima facie unbounded nature of natural language, contrasted with the finite character of our memory and computational resources, is often taken to warrant a recursive language processing mechanism. The widely held distinction between an idealized infinite grammatical competence and the actual finite natural language performance provides further support for a recursive processor. In this pa...

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical dementia syndrome with early symptoms of language dysfunction. Postmortem findings are varied and include Alzheimer disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), both tauopathies and TAR DNA binding protein (TDP-43) proteinopathies. Clinical-pathological correlations in PPA are complex but the presence in the clinical profile of agrammatis...

In a number of studies, the acquisition of restrictive relative clauses (RCs) shows contrasting findings regarding comprehension and production, with the former usually delayed up to the age of 5. As previously claimed in the literature, we suggest that this delay is a task artefact and we present a new Agent selection task for the assessment of restrictive RCs. Data from 3to 7-year-old Italian...

This article examines the problem of using effective methods teaching grammatical aspect a second foreign language. It highlights importance skills and abilities for successful formation language communicative competence. is revealed that methodology grammar should be based on rational combination comparative communicative-cognitive approaches. The authors lay emphasis necessity relying first l...

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the effect of task repetition under four conditions on the three dimensions of oral production (accuracy, complexity and fluency) and grammatical knowledge gain of learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). 40 young learners of English as a Foreign Language in four classes were randomly assigned into one of the following groups: repetitio...

Human language, and grammatical competence in particular, relies on a set of computational operations that, in its entirety, is not observed in other animals. Such uniqueness leaves open the possibility that components of our linguistic competence are shared with other animals, having evolved for non-linguistic functions. Here, we explore this problem from a comparative perspective, asking whet...