The present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced Iranian learners of English as a Foreign Language. The study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and Wh-clefts. After taking the Nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

PURPOSE Prior studies of discourse comprehension have concluded that the deficits of persons with aphasia (PWA) in syntactically based comprehension of sentences in isolation are not predictive of deficits in comprehension of sentences in discourse (Brookshire & Nicholas, 1984; Caplan & Evans, 1990). However, these studies used semantically constrained sentences in discourse, which do not requi...

This paper describes a study of the levels at which different rhetorical relations occur in rhetorical structure trees. In a previous empirical study (Williams and Reiter, 2003) of the RST-DT (Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank) Corpus (Carlson et al., 2003), we noticed that certain rhetorical relations tended to occur more frequently at higher levels in a rhetorical structure tree,...

The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test including 2 Likert scales on attitudinal appropriatenes...

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVE To quantifiably measure the impact of self-instructed radiological anatomy modules on anatomy comprehension, demonstrated by radiology, gross, and written exams. MATERIALS AND METHODS Study guides for independent use that emphasized structural relationships were created for use with two online radiology atlases. A guide was created for each module of the first year med...

background: academic tests are valuable tools for evaluating students’ knowledge and capabilities. this study aimed to assess the content validity offinal examinations at mashhad dental school. the practical purpose of this study was to enhance the quality of written examinations in this school. methods: the present descriptive, cross-sectional study aimed to determine the content validity of f...

RASTA (Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer), a discourse analysis component within the Microsoft English Grammar, efficiently computes representations of the structure of written discourse using information available in syntactic and logical form analyses. RASTA heuristically scores the rhetorical relations that it hypothesizes, using those scores to guide it in producing more plausible discou...