Adults and young children prefer to affiliate with some individuals rather than others. Studies have shown that monolingual children show in-group biases for individuals who speak their native language without a foreign accent (Kinzler et al., 2007). Some studies have suggested that bilingual children are less influenced than monolinguals by language variety when attributing personality traits ...

This study was an attempt to shed light on the use of requestive speech act by Iranian nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English and Canadian native speakers (NSs) of English to find out the (possible) similarities and/or differences between the request realizations, and to investigate the influence of the situational variables of power, distance, context familiarity, and L1’s (possible) influence. ...

This study investigates whether four-month-old Japanese infants are able to distinguish English from Japanese spoken by a bilingual woman (level 9.5) (Experiment 1), and then, spoken by a Japanese monolingual woman (level 1) who has learned English fifty years ago and never been to English speaking countries (Experiment 2). According to Mehler et al. (1993), rhythmic cues play a role for infant...

Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (L2) acquisition after the critical period. In this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from Persian speaking learners of English as an L2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (RPs) as uniterpretable features. Unlike English which does not allow RPs, Persian shows various b...

The present study examined whether bilingualism facilitates acquisition of novel words in adults with different language histories. Word-learning performance was tested in monolingual English speakers, early English-Spanish bilinguals, and early English-Mandarin bilinguals. Novel words were phonologically unfamiliar to all participants, and they were acquired in association with their English t...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the distribution of functions and forms of hedging devices in the abstracts of master’s theses in two languages (English and Persian) written by Iranian students. To this end, 70 abstracts of M.A. theses were selected as the corpus. The total number of words in both English and Persian abstracts were 19,933 and 23,073, respectively. The categories of...

This paper describes the AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the WMT14 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on Russian to English and Hindi to English translation tasks. In addition, we describe our efforts to make use of monolingual English spe...