the growing attention to formulaic sequences during the last decade indicates that the functional features of such sequences play a crucial role in writing. formulaic sequences are prefabricated linguistic components which are stored and retrieved as a whole. the present study aims to examine the functional features of such sequences in persian writings. to do so, 10 writing samples of persian ...

We carried out a machine-translation postediting pilot study with users of an IT support forum community. For both language pairs (English to German, English to French), 4 native speakers for each language were recruited. They performed monolingual and bilingual postediting tasks on machine-translated forum content. The post-edited content was evaluated using human evaluation (fluency, comprehe...

Abstract Across languages, structures with non-canonical word order have been shown to be problematic for both child and adult heritage speakers. To investigate the linguistic child-level factors that modulate speakers’ difficulties orders, we examined comprehension production of three Mandarin in 5- 9-year-old Mandarin-English children compared them age-matched Mandarin-speaking monolingual ad...

Bilingualism has two possible cognitive outcomes. One is that the very knowledge and use of two languages affects cognition, regardless of the languages involved -the macro level. An example of this may be increased metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok, 2001) or delayed onset of Alzheimer’s (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004). Another outcome is that the learning of two languages affe...

Although grammatical gender category assignment is arbitrary with respect to the semantics of gender, speakers of languages with grammatical gender conceive of non-gendered objects as having gendered characteristics consistent with the grammatical gender category to which they belong, a phenomenon we call conceptual spread. To extend these findings, we ask if orthographic gender – gender inform...

The early course of language development among children from bilingual homes varies in ways that are not well described and as a result of influences that are not well understood. Here, we describe trajectories of relative change in expressive vocabulary from 22 to 48 months and vocabulary achievement at 48 months in two groups of children from bilingual homes (children with one and children wi...

In two self-paced reading experiments we asked whether late, highly proficient, English-Spanish bilinguals are able to process language-specific morpho-syntactic information in their second language (L2). The processing of Spanish clitic pronouns' word order was tested in two sentential constructions. Experiment 1 showed that English-Spanish bilinguals performed similarly to Spanish-English bil...

This study was conducted with the purpose of examining Persian speakers’ article acquisition and use with reference to Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) model, which is based on the prediction of Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) that EFL learners of [-article] languages, like Persian, make erroneous article use in [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific] contexts. From among the students of an ...

This study examined differences in attentional control among school-age children who were monolingual English speakers, early childhood Spanish-English bilinguals who began speaking both languages by age 3, and later childhood Spanish-English bilingual children who began speaking English after age 3. Children's attentional control was tested using the Attention Network Test (ANT). All language ...

Modal verbs in English are challenging to learn by speakers of other languages. The purpose of thiswas to shed light on the use of gesture in learning English modal verbs by Persian-speaking children.To achieve this, 60 elementary Iranian learners, studying at some institutes in Karaj took part in thisstudy. The participants were randomly put into one experimental group and one control group. T...