Articles in general and definite articles in particular can create problems even long after all other aspects of English have been mastered. The present article investigated the learnability problems related to the acquisition of count-mass distinction of English nominals by Persian L2 learners. The theoretical underpinning of the study is the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopou...

María Ángeles Alcaraz María Ángeles Alcaraz Abstract This article reports the findings of a content analysis of acknowledgments, authorship and collaboration practices in a medical corpus made up of 100 Englishand 100 Spanish-written research papers, distributed in five blocks of 20 papers each, and randomly drawn in the period 2001–2012 from BMC Neurology and Revista Española de Neurología, tw...

Introduction: Optimum pain management immediately after surgeries can lower the possibility of pain syndrome and its following consequences. Opioids are amongst the analgesics used for postoperative pain control; however, their application can bring about several adverse effects. In this study, all the published articles regarding efficacy of Paracetamol   in post-cardiac surgery pain managemen...

BACKGROUND With the expansion of scientific documents worldwide and the growth of Iranian articles published in recent years, highly sensitive electronic resources containing scientific studies can be of great help to researchers at different stages of research. This study has been conducted to examine the sensitivity of domestic and international databases to locate Iranian articles related to...

There has been much recent work investigating second language (L2) acquisition of English articles by speakers of article-less L1s (Huebner 1983, Master 1987, Parrish 1987, Thomas 1989, Kaneko 1996, Leung 2001, Ionin, Ko and Wexler 2004, Hawkins et al. 2006, Ko, Ionin and Wexler 2006, Ionin, Zubizarreta and Bautista Maldonado 2008, Trenkic 2008, among others). Examining L2-learners production o...

Researchers have long been puzzled by children's variable omission of grammatical morphemes, often attributing this to a lack of semantic or syntactic competence. Recent studies suggest that some of this variability may be due to phonological constraints. This paper explored this issue further by conducting a longitudinal study of five English-speaking one- to two-year-olds' acquisition of arti...

In light of the fact that L2 pronunciation errors are often caused by the transfer of well-established L1 sound systems, this paper examines some of the characteristic phonological differences between Japanese and English. Comparing segmental and suprasegmental aspects of both languages, this study also discusses several problematic areas of pronunciation for Japanese learners of English. Based...

BACKGROUND In times of globalization there is an increasing use of English in the medical literature. The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of English-language articles in multi-language medical journals on their international recognition--as measured by a lower rate of self-citations and higher impact factor (IF). METHODS AND FINDINGS We analyzed publications in multi-language j...