We examined the effects of argument-head distance in SVO and SOV languages (Spanish and German), while taking into account readers' working memory capacity and controlling for expectation (Levy, 2008) and other factors. We predicted only locality effects, that is, a slowdown produced by increased dependency distance (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). Furthermore, we expected stronger loc...

Social interactions among diverse individuals that encounter one another in nature have often been studied among animals but rarely among microbes. For example, the evolutionary forces that determine natural frequencies of bacteria that express cooperative behaviours at low levels remain poorly understood. Natural isolates of the soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus sampled from the same fruiting ...

although filling the gap in reading comprehension gained momentum with the rise of the top-down approach, vygotsky’ concept of scaffolding and the dual code  theory provided a strong support for the use of paratext to enhance comprehension. scaffolding is dependent on other-regulation, one type of which is object-regulation. from this vantage-point, various types of paratext can function as sou...

If a finite group G has a presentation with d generators and r relations, it is well-known that r−d is at least the rank of the Schur multiplier of G; a presentation is called efficient if equality holds. There is an analogous definition for proficient profinite presentations. We show that many perfect groups have proficient presentations. Moreover, we prove that infinitely many alternating gro...

Abstract The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between cohesive readability of expository texts and reading comprehension in EFL students with different proficiency levels. One hundred students formed the participant of this study. They were undergraduate students majoring in English at University of Isfahan. To collect the relevant data, participants were divide...

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...

this study aims at uncovering the effect(s) of genre-based instruction (gbi) on listening proficiency among iranian efl learners. moreover, it seeks to explore the relationship between effectiveness of gbi and listening proficiency. for this purpose, 68 efl learners in two different groups at zabol university were selected. group a included 30 participants (12 males and 18 females), and group b...

We examined the influence of print exposure on the body-object interaction (BOI) effect in visual word recognition. High print exposure readers and low print exposure readers either made semantic categorizations ("Is the word easily imageable?"; Experiment 1) or phonological lexical decisions ("Does the item sound like a real English word?"; Experiment 2). The results from Experiment 1 showed t...

to entomologists when a rock climber, returning from a 1964 expedition to Ball’s Pyramid in the LHIG, produced a photo of what appeared to be the recently dead remains of one. That they could be living on a menacingly steep and barren volcanic outcrop, 500 metres tall and shaped like a needle, seemed implausible, particularly as there were no trees, only shrubs, on the island. Add to that the f...