This study examined how motivation for learning English, the amount of contact with English, and  length  of  residence  in  the  target language area affects Korean graduate students’ English pragmatic skills. The study attempted to account for differential pragmatic development among 50  graduate-level  Korean  students  in  relation  to  individual  factors  mentioned  above.  The  data were...

abstract norton’s (1995) investment hypothesis in l2 learning that l2 learners who cherish and foresee a richer personality for themselves in their l2 context would thrive more diligently and consequently would both enrich their personality and achieve a higher proficiency in their new language was investigated in this study in the community of iranian efl students. the integration and mutual r...

With the shift in the medical education curriculum to a competencybased model, objective proficiency assessment is necessary. In this work, we use exploratory factor analysis to assess which primitive metrics convey unique information about proficiency in point-of-care ultrasound applications. We retrospectively validate the proposed methods on three datasets: FAST examination, femoral line, an...

Mathematical proficiency is central to success in everyday life, yet its cognitive foundations remain unclear. In previous study, two cognitive abilities have emerged as likely prerequisites – proficiency with symbolic and non-symbolic numbers. In this study, we examined arithmetic proficiency as a function of individual differences in six tasks: symbolic and non-symbolic addition, numerical es...

We report three reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) semantic priming lexical decision experiments that explore the following in relation to L1 activation during L2 processing: (1) the role of L2 proficiency, (2) the role of sentence context, and (3) the locus of L1 activations (orthographic vs. semantic). All experiments used German (L1) homonyms translated into English (L2) ...

Functional imaging methods show differences in the pattern of cerebral activation associated with the subject's native language (L1) compared with a second language (L2). In a recent PET investigation on bilingualism we showed that auditory processing of stories in L1 (Italian) engages the temporal lobes and temporoparietal cortex more extensively than L2 (English). However, in that study the I...

Language proficiency is predicted to modulate orthographic-semantic association in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition, in accordance with the assumptions of the Developmental Bilingual Interactive-Activation model (BIA-d) (Grainger et al., 2010). The current study explored this modulation during pre-attentive L2 orthographic perception. ERPs were recorded from Chinese-English bilingual...

OBJECTIVE The number of individuals with limited English proficiency in the USA is large and rapidly growing. Consequently, addressing language barriers in access to medical care is becoming increasingly important. Previous studies have reported that individuals with limited English proficiency have more difficulty gaining access to care, compared to English-proficient individuals. We assessed ...