Visual experiences increase our ability to discriminate environmentally relevant stimuli (native stimuli, e.g., human faces) at the cost of a reduced sensitivity to irrelevant or infrequent stimuli (non-native stimuli, e.g., monkey/ape faces)-a developmental progression known as perceptual narrowing. One possible source of the reduced sensitivity in distinguishing non-native stimuli (e.g., one ...

Though there is a long tradition of research into word order phenomena in Second Language (L2) acquisition, this area of enquiry has recently been given a new impetus both from theoretical developments on the form-function interplay and, crucially, from the emergence of learner corpora This paper focuses on a particular phenomenon which has received considerable attention in the literature: the...

The present study examined email communication practices of two groups of students in Iran and the United States to uncover the probable differences between Iranian and American email communication norms. The study also aimed at investigating how power distance in academic centers influences students’ choices of communication strategies in email writing. The use of two politeness strategies nam...

Results Compared to controls (n = 40), native T1 values were increased in both acute and chronic myocarditis at both field strengths (controls vs. acute vs. chronic myocarditis; 1.5T: native T1 (msec): 940 ± 17 vs. 1070 ± 34 vs. 998 ± 28, p < 0.001; 3T: 1045 ± 18 vs. 1182 ± 66 vs. 1094 ± 15, p < 0.001). Native T1 values were significantly higher in acute vs. chronic myocardium (p < 0.001). Nati...

This study investigated whether Iranian EFL learners are aware of different varieties of English spoken throughout the world and whether they have tendency towards a particular variety of English. Likewise, it explored the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners towards the native and non-native varieties of English. Moreover, it made an attempt to investigate whether such attitudes are gender-orient...

We show that it is possible to learn to identify, with high accuracy, the native language of English test takers from the content of the essays they write. Our method uses standard text classification techniques based on multiclass logistic regression, combining individually weak indicators to predict the most probable native language from a set of 11 possibilities. We describe the various feat...

The study of lexical bundles, among types of text analysis, is gaining importance over the others in the last century. The present study employed a frequency-based analysis approach to the use of lexical bundles. The discussion section of 60 political science articles, with corpora around 253,063 words were investigated in three aspects of structure, form, and function of lexical bundles. The p...

AIMS To test the hypothesis that exposure to ambient language in the womb alters phonetic perception shortly after birth. This two-country study aimed to see whether neonates demonstrated prenatal learning by how they responded to vowels in a category from their native language and another non-native language, regardless of how much postnatal experience the infants had. METHOD A counterbalanc...