Teacher self-efficacy has been identified as an important characteristic of teachers that can positively influence both teacher and student outcomes. The relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and their linguistic proficiency, however, is yet to be investigated. The present study was an attempt to examine the rather under-researched issue of teachers’ level of linguistic competence in the...

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation,...

A central part of NLP research is devoted to the development of parsing systems which analyze the way words combine to form phrases and sentences. This analysis is considered the first step towards natural language understanding, or, as it is often put, extracting “who did what to whom”. Such information is crucial for computer programs that perform tasks such as information retrieval, question...

A new approach for an efficient text analyser is proposed. The prosody generator-driven method is employed to design an efficient text analyser for Mandarin text-to-speech. More simple structure of text analysis, more suitable classification of linguistic features and more efficient contribution of linguistic features to the prosody generator can be achieved. Three heuristic and theoretical met...

People are constrained by their culture and social life when telling stories. A second language learner then cannot be expected to tell stories in the target language without cross-cultural effects that influence the way of narration. The present study examined the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the organization of narratives by focusing on Persian speakers’ and EFL...

Recently, researchers reported a bias for placing agents predominantly on the left side of pictures. Both hemispheric specialization and cultural preferences have been hypothesized to be the origin of this bias. To evaluate these hypotheses, we conducted a study with participants exposed to different reading and writing systems: Germans, who use a left-to-right system, and Israelis, who use a r...

In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the role of transfer has been theorized and studied to account for the influence of the native language on an interlanguage. However, stemming from behaviorist mentality, the concept of transfer has become widely associated with the direct transfer of habits and fails to take into consideration other cross-linguistic influences (CLI) that shape...