1. In the methods section, the authors state that they have measured English proficiency in the sample. However, not much is done with this data in the manuscript. Therefore, I suggest to delete this from the text or include results of this measurement. Otherwise, the sample may have been exposed to unnecessary measurements, which is not ethically sound. We appreciate Reviewer #1’s comments. We...

IMPORTANCE Instructional methods for the simple suture technique vary widely and are seldom based on educational research. Published data indicate that video primers and structured instruction and evaluation decrease learning time and improve skill acquisition. OBJECTIVES To determine the amount of practice needed to attain simple suture proficiency and to identify the optimal teaching schedu...

the present study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of different types of pragmatic instruction including two collaborative translation tasks and two structured input tasks with and without explicit pragmatic instruction on the production of apologetic utterances by low-intermediate efl learners. one hundred and fifty university students in four experimental groups and one control ...

this study aims to delve into the unobservable dimensions of deciding and acting in a pragmatically significant speech event. utilizing a discourse completion test questionnaire, it seeks to find out the structure and pragmatic functions that lie behind efl learners’ choice of specific wording while engaged in performing a recurrent speech act in iran i.e. compliments. to this aim, 30 efl learn...

AIMS The accuracy of ribotyping and antibiotic resistance analysis (ARA) for prediction of sources of faecal bacterial pollution in an urban southern California watershed was determined using blinded proficiency samples. METHODS AND RESULTS Antibiotic resistance patterns and HindIII ribotypes of Escherichia coli (n = 997), and antibiotic resistance patterns of Enterococcus spp. (n = 3657) wer...

1. Preliminaries In general, for languages which allow a flexible order of major constituents, the grammatical variations of simple sentences are truth-conditionally equivalent regardless of the constituent sequences and of the intonational patterns. In Spanish, for instance, the six logically possible variations of sentences containing three constituents, namely, subject, verb, and object are ...

In Chinese language processing, the recognition and analysis for serial verb constructions (SVCs) is a fascinating research topic. Chinese language researchers each may have a different definition and interpretation of SVC since the structure of SVC makes Chinese unique to other languages and contains complex semantic and pragmatic information. This paper proposes a formal definition of SVC and...

We examine a popular practitioner methodology used in the construction of linear factor models whereby particular factors are increased or decreased in relative importance within the model. This allows model builders to customise models and, as such, reflect those factors that the client and modeller may think important. We call this process Pragmatic Bayesianism (or prag-Bayes for short) and w...

In natural communication, humans enrich their utterances with pragmatic information indicating, e.g., what is important to them or what they are not certain about. We investigate whether and how virtual humans (VH) can employ this kind of meta-communication. In an empirical study we have identified three modifying functions that humans produce and perceive in multimodal utterance, one being to ...

This study examined the association between English language proficiency and health outcomes in a regional probability sample (n = 205) of elderly Chinese and Korean immigrants. Data support that these two Asian ethnic subgroups differ in English proficiency and health-related quality of life. Chinese and Korean elders had poorer health than the national norms, and poor English proficiency was ...