The notion of a “thematic role” has been an important one in linguistic theories concerning the syntax/semantics interface (Fillmore, 1968), but their effects on high-level cognition remain relatively unexplored. Thematic roles,like AGENT and PATIENT, are said to be linked with specific grammatical positions like that of “subject” and “direct object”. Here we ask if the link between grammatical...

We automatically classify verbs into lexical semantic classes, based on distributions of indicators of verb alternations, extracted from a very large annotated corpus. We address a problem which is particularly di cult because the verb classes, although semantically di erent, show similar surface syntactic behavior. Five grammatical features are su cient to reduce error rate by more than 50% ov...

Objectives: Self-assessment, as one type of alternative assessment, with the increased attention to learner-centered curricula, needs analysis, and learner autonomy has gained popularity in recent years. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of self-assessment on Javanroodian Foreign Language (Kordestan) Learners’ Oral Performance ability. Methods: The assessment program ...

introduction: hearing loss from birth up to the age of 3 years has a negative effect on speech/language development and results in sensory, cognitive, emotional, and academic defects in adulthood by causing delayed development of communicative-linguistic abilities. the present study was performed in order to assess the effect of early intervention on language development in persian children age...

We have recently made significant changes to the BBN DELPHI syntactic and semantic analysis component. These goal of these changes was to maintain the fight coupling between syntax and semantics characteristic of earlier versions of DELPHI, while making it possible for the system to provide useful semantic interpretations of input for which complete syntactic analysis is impossible. Semantic in...

Recent analyses have revealed that child-directed speech contains distributional regularities that could, in principle, support young children's discovery of distinct grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective). In particular, a distributional unit known as the frequent frame appears to be especially informative (Mintz, 2003). However, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the distribu...

This meta-analysis is an investigation into the impressibility of two dimensions of the speaking skill, namely accuracy and fluency, in relation to the experimented treatments among Iranian EFL undergraduates. Having surveyed a collected bank of 74 research reports, the relationships among the variables in the 14 included studies were examined. More specifically, the analysis involved a statist...

The focus of this study is to investigate the comparative effect of teaching grammar through interpretation tasks and pictorial clues on EFL learners’ writing accuracy. The participants were 60 female intermediate EFL learners with age range of 21-35 who were divided into two experimental groups after being homogenized by a piloted PET test. In the piloted researcher-made pre-test, the research...