The purpose of this study was to examine Cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from L2 [English] to L1 [Persian]) in refusals to invitations. It explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in L1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of EFL learners. The participants were Persi...

While language competition models of diachronic language shift are increasingly sophisticated, drawing on sociolinguistic components like variable language prestige, distance from language centers and intermediate bilingual transitionary populations, in one significant way they fall short. They fail to consider contact-based outcomes resulting in mixed language practices, e.g. outcome scenarios...

As interaction between speakers of different languages continues to increase, the everpresent problem of language barriers must be overcome. For the same reason, automatic language translation (Machine Translation) has become an attractive area of research and development. Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) has been used for translation between many language pairs, the results of which have ...

This study evaluates the extent to which the production of referring expressions such as noun phrases and pronouns to fulfill various discourse functions in narratives of Chinese–English bilingual children matches that of their monolingual peers in each of the two languages. Spoken narratives in English and Chinese were elicited from 30 9-year-old participants from each of the three groups: Chi...

Modern Persian permits coda clusters, many of which violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle. In a syllable counting task, Persian speakers consistently perceived clusters in CVCC target items as monosyllabic, whereas English speakers generally perceived clusters existing in English as monosyllabic but those not existing in English as bi-syllabic. Moreover, the latter were perceived as monosyl...

this study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in english produced by persian speakers learning english as a foreign language. the four most reliable phonetic correlates of english lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five english disyllabi...

Mastering vocabulary knowledge has always been a major concern for language learners (Nation, 2002). The present research mainly concerned with the impression comparing the performance of Iranian bilingual EFL students with monolingual groups by means of the treatment of the etymology of unknown English words upon their vocabulary retention. The ongoing research aimed at exploring the significa...

This study is an attempt to carry out a comparative analysis using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM). The offering routine patterns of native Persian speakers was compared with that of Native American English speakers to see if it can provide evidence for applicability of NSM model which is claimed to be universal. The descriptive technique was the cultural scripts approach, using ...

The present study investigates the extent of word-final devoicing in Russian for three groups of speakers: monolingual native Russian speakers (4 Ss), native Russian speakers with knowledge of English (7 Ss), and American English learners of Russian (9 Ss). Thirty-four minimal pairs of Russian words differing in the underlying voicing of word-final obstruents were recorded. Acoustic analysis fo...