This study investigates the non-native production of rhotics by Mandarin speakers learning Persian as L3 and it compares the results with that of native speakers. In the light of the findings, one of the predictions made by the Speech Learning Model was tested. According to this model, speech acquisition happens at a position-sensitive allophonic level. A series of informal /casual interviews w...

This paper proposes a supervised speaker adaptation method that is effective for both non-native (i.e. Japanese) and native English speakers’ pronunciation of English speech. This method uses English and Japanese phoneme acoustic models and a pronunciation lexicon in which each word has both English and Japanese phoneme transcriptions. The same utterances are used for adaptation of both acousti...

Some language communities routinely use allocentric reference directions (e.g. 'uphill-downhill') where speakers of European languages would use egocentric references ('left-right'). Previous experiments have suggested that the different language groups use different reference frames in non-linguistic tasks involving the recreation of oriented arrays. However, a recent paper argues that manipul...

The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL lea...

The present study sought to investigate whether there is any difference between topicalization processes in English and Persian structures among EFL learners.50 female students of Jahad Daneshgahi English Language Institute in Qazvin participated in this study. All of the participants were native speakers of Persian studying in Jahad Daneshgahi English Language Institute in Qazvin, Iran. The pa...

In recent years, large monolingual, comparable and parallel corpora have played a very crucial role in solving various problems of computational linguistics including machine translation, information retrieval, natural language processing, and the like. This paper tries to solve the problem of polysemy of Persian words while translating them into Persian by the computer. We use Mutual Informati...

People are constrained by their culture and social life when telling stories. A second language learner then cannot be expected to tell stories in the target language without cross-cultural effects that influence the way of narration. The present study examined the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the organization of narratives by focusing on Persian speakers’ and EFL...

The main objective of the present study was to investigate the differences between Iranian EFL monolinguals and bilinguals in terms of vocabulary language learning strategies. In fact, it was an attempt to investigate whether bilingual/ monolingual learners differ significantly in using vocabulary learning strategies. To this end, 70 EFL, 45 monolingual (Persian) and 25 bilingual (Arabic-Persia...