Research on L2 learners’ success at development and appropriate use of pragmatic ability and knowledge has mostly approached the issue from a cognitive or social perspective, and less attention has been devoted to the problem from the equally important emotional or individual-psychological lenses. This study sought to explore, first, the interplay between Iranian advanced EFL learners’ pragmati...

Objective To describe the frequency of pragmatic and executive deficits in right brain damaged (RBD) and in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients, and to verify possible dissociations between pragmatic and executive functions in these two groups. Methods The sample comprised 7 cases of TBI and 7 cases of RBD. All participants were assessed by means of tasks from the Montreal Communication Eva...

This paper investigates the mutual intelligibility of Chinese, Dutch (both foreign-language learners) and American (native language) speakers of English using SUS (Semantically Unpredictable Sentences) and SPIN (Speech in Noise) materials. We test the hypothesis that speakers and listeners who share the same native-language background have an advantage (interlanguage speech intelligibility bene...

Impairments in the social use of language, or pragmatics, constitute a core characteristic of autism. Problems with pragmatic language have also been documented in fragile X syndrome (FXS), a monogenic condition that is the most common known genetic cause of autism. Evidence suggests that social cognitive ability, or theory of mind, may also be impaired in both conditions, and in autism, may im...

This paper conducts acoustic experiments from a signal processing perspective, to examine the “-/a/ /C_” syllable narrow focus processing strategy of English L2 learners. The research discusses F0, OQ and SQ as key phonatory acoustic parameters. L2 strategies are examined by measuring deviations from L1 group to L2 group. The matrix distance reflects L1’s traces in the interlanguage system.

The Pragmatic Web is seen as a direction for realizing the vision of the Semantic Web. Realizing the vision of the Pragmatic Web, however, requires a shift in thinking about technology as a means for designing communication (which is making forms of interactivity possible that may otherwise be difficult or impossible). Some lessons from theory and research on Pragmatics provide grounds for unde...

In pragmatics, the theory of language use, it is standard to assume that communication is a cooperative affair. Recently, this standard view has come under attack by Ducrot and Merin, and it has been proposed that an argumentative view on natural language use is more appropriate. In this paper I discuss to what extent this attack is justified and whether the alternative view can provide a more ...

The aim of the present study was to examine the communicative abilities of traumatic brain injury patients (TBI). We wish to provide a complete assessment of their communicative ability/disability using a new experimental protocol, the Assessment Battery of Communication, (ABaCo) comprising five scales--linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, context and conversational--which investigate a...

How is temporal information conveyed in language? In languages with tense it is direct; without tense, inference allows the receiver to arrive at an indirect temporal interpretation. I will discuss tensed and tenseless languages, proposing a unified approach that applies to both. I show that a few very general pragmatic principles account for temporal interpretation, direct and indirect. I assu...