We assessed the English vocabulary and verbal fluency of college students who were either bilinguals who were born abroad and spoke English or monolingual speakers of English. We examined the relationship between age of arrival to the U.S. of bilinguals and their English vocabulary. The bilinguals' performance on English vocabulary was in the average range. However, despite arriving to the U.S....

This study aimed to examine cross-cultural differences in performing refusal of requests between Persian native speakers (PNSs) and English native speakers (ENSs) in terms of the frequency of the semantic formulas. Also examined in this study was whether Persian EFL learners would transfer their L1 refusal patterns into the L2, and if there would be a relation between their proficiency level an...

MonoTrans2 is a translation system that combines machine translation (MT) with human computation using two crowds of monolingual source (Haitian Creole) and target (English) speakers. We report on its use in the WMT 2011 Haitian Creole to English translation task, showing that MonoTrans2 translated 38% of the sentences well compared to Google Translate’s 25%.

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African children preferred speakers of their first langua...

Despite the global spread of English, it seems that voices from Persian-speaking teachers concerning English as an international language (EIL) teaching methods and materials are underrepresented. The present study set out to explore how nonnative Persian-speaking English language teachers respond to the increasing global dominance of EIL and native- and non-native-speakers’ language norms with...

The present paper endeavours to investigate whether L1 Persian speakers are sensitive to a ‘poverty of the stimulus’ situation in English: the asymmetrical constraint on piedpiping and stranding constructions. Both prepositions and particles can be stranded in interrogatives and relative clauses, but only prepositional phrases can appear in piedpiping structures. In contrast, Persian licenses p...

conversations contain spontaneous use of routine formulas which lets speaker sinteract with each other to express opinions. gambits, as one of these formulas, act as an opening remark and help speakers to maintain the smooth flow of an everyday conversation. the lack of mastery of using gambits in maintaining the conversation leads to breakdowns in speaking. this paper aimedat comparingthe use ...

Previous research has shown that, when hearers listen to artificially speeded speech, their performance improves over the course of 10-15 sentences, as if their perceptual system was "adapting" to these fast rates of speech. In this paper, we further investigate the mechanisms that are responsible for such effects. In Experiment 1, we report that, for bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, ...

Abstract When pursuing a controversial socio-scientific issue, readers are expected to construct balanced representations that include overlapping and opposing information. However, readers’ mental often biased towards their prior beliefs. Previous research on such text-belief consistency effects have been conducted mostly in monolingual contexts. The present study investigated whether document...

this paper was aimed at investigating the persian-speaking translation trainees perception of politeness of english request strategies. they judged the strategies for requesting (e.g. can, could, will, do, etc.) using the paired comparison method. the findings showed great divergence between the judgment of english native speakers with respect to the degree of politeness of 14 generic request s...