Language interpretation is often assumed to be incremental. However, our studies of quantifier expressions in isolated sentences found N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) evidence for partial but not full immediate quantifier interpretation (Urbach & Kutas, 2010). Here we tested similar quantifier expressions in pragmatically supporting discourse contexts (Alex was an unusual toddler. Most...

Two experiments tested text comprehension skills in adults varying in age from 20 to 69 years. A coherence judgment task (n = 39), in which the pragmatic connection of two sentences had to be evaluated, did not yield any age effects. Both error rates and reaction times were largely independent of age. In a word recognition paradigm (n = 60), testing the strength of different text representation...

Comprehension is closely related not only to the knowledge of words and syntax, but also the pragmatic concerns of the discourse. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of the intonational clues selection of Iranian teenagers’ and young adults’ Persian listening comprehension ability on their English learning as a second language. According to Buck (2003), in listening c...

Although the neurocognitive processes underlying the comprehension of figurative language, especially metaphors and idioms, have been studied extensively, less is known about the processing of irony. In two experiments using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the types of cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of ironic and literal sentences and their relative time co...

The article covers the issues concerning levels and criteria of preparatory department students' understanding scientific text. Teaching language presupposes work with texts at a proficiency level A1. When teaching how to text, one should consider its pragmatic, contents cognitive discourse functions. Understanding is multi-level psychological category, which determines foreign way reading Each...

Abstract Manual co-speech gestures can facilitate language comprehension, but do they influence comprehension in simultaneous interpreters, and if so, is this modulated by interpreting (SI) and/or experience? In a picture-matching task, 24 professional interpreters translators were exposed to utterances accompanied semantically matching representational gestures, unrelated pragmatic or no while...

This study critically examines the widely held belief that the Chinese language provides no consistent linguistic forms for expressing counterfactual ideas (Bloom, 1981). In Study 1, native speakers of Chinese identified counterfactual sentences from a large corpus of Chinese texts. A number of syntactic and/or lexical forms are found to be highly predictive of counterfactuality. Aspect modific...

Having pragmatic competence, one can communicate appropriately in social contexts. Pragmatic competence is defined as “the ability to use the language express a wide range of functions well interpret their illocutionary force discourse according socio-cultural context which they are used”. The present study aimed at investigating Iraqi Kurdish EFL learners through comprehension speech acts, imp...