Abstract This work explores laughter within a corpus of three-party, task-based dialogs with native and non-native speakers English, each consisting two players facilitator, in relation to whether the is perceived as serving discourse functions or rather genuinely mirthful according small number annotators’ (2) inspection substantical multimodal dialog (18 interactions approximately 10 min each...

ABSTRACT: Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are neurodegenerative diseases that affect several mammalian species. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is among the mentioned diseases in cattle caused by abnormally fold prion proteins. Polymorphisms of the prion protein gene (PRNP) have been shown to be major determinations for the susceptibility to transmitted perion diseases in human...

This study examined the contribution of both auditory and visual cues in native and non-native speech perception. Three groups of listeners, a group of native speakers of English and two groups of EFL learners (elementary and advanced), were tested on their perception of auditory-only, visual-only and audiovisual English stimuli. The audiovisual stimuli included a congruent (matched auditory-vi...

due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the iranian and english contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (dms) between the two cultures. to this end, three s...

According to many research findings, the presence of discourse markers (DMs) enhances readers’ comprehension of the texts they read. However, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between knowledge of DMs and reading comprehension (RC) and the present study explores the relationship between them. Knowledge of DMs is measured through examining the subjects’ recognition of DMs. To ca...

The power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on the mind of audience (van Dijk 1996). This potential is realized via different linguistic resources, one important group of which is metadiscoursal resources. The major aim of this study was to explore how and in what distribution these resources are employed by writers with different cultural backg...

The e-rater system 1 is an operational automated essay scoring system, developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS). The average agreement between human readers, and between independent human readers and e-rater is approximately 92%. There is much interest in the larger writing community in examining the system’s performance on nonnative speaker essays. This paper focuses on results of a stud...