This study examines communication characteristics and specific language deficits in 47 children and adolescents diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia using DSM-III-R criteria. All had been referred for speech and language services because of apparent communication problems. Standardized tests and formal measures were used to identify impairment in discrete areas of communication, including p...

This paper describes a novel method to improve the performance of second language speech recognition when the mother tongue of users is known. Considering that second language speech usually includes less fluent pronunciation and more frequent pronunciation mistakes, I propose using a reduced phoneme set generated by a phonetic decision tree (PDT)-based top-down sequential splitting method inst...

This study investigated the effects of different output-based task repetition conditions on EFL learners’ speech act production. Three intact classes of English-major students constituted three instructional groups: (1) the explicit task-repetition (ETR) group, (2) the implicit task-repetition (ITR) group, and (3) the no-input task repetition (NTR) group. All the three groups engaged in t...

How language teachers talk is a key factor in organizing and facilitating learning specifically in language classrooms where the medium of instruction is also the subject matter. This study aimed to examine the extent and ways of teacher talk adaptation to students’ proficiency levels in the Iranian EFL context. Two EFL teachers who were teaching three different proficiency levels were observed...

The seemingly effortless and incidental way in which infants acquire and perfect the ability to use spoken language/s is quite remarkable considering the complexity of human linguistic systems. Parsing the spoken signal successfully is in fact anything but trivial, as attested by the challenge posed by learning a new language later in life, let alone attaining native-like proficiency. It is now...

A sizeable body of research into instructed pragmatics roots from the noticing hypothesis: comparing im- plicit and explicit instruction. It is only recently that other theories, including the output hypothesis, have been researched as possible explanations of interlanguage pragmatic development. Pursuing the same line of research, the present study addressed the impact of collaborative o...

abstract textbooks play an important role in english language teaching (elt), particularly in the english as a foreign language (efl) context where it provides the primary linguistic input. the present research was an attempt to comparatively evaluate the touchstone series in terms of compliment and complaint speech acts. four touchstone textbooks (book 1, book 2, book 3, and book 4) were selec...

In the past decades, there has been much progress in the formal Semantics of ordinary language. Logicians, linguists and philosophers have extensively used logical formalisms in order to interpret directly or after translation important fragments of actual natural languages. They have thereby contributed to the foundations of the theory of sentence meaning. In formal Semantics, speaker meaning ...