this study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level english as foreign language (efl) learners in taiwan. the goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on efl learners’ pragmatic competence. second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...

Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively deficient. More recently, some investigators have beg...

The main aim of the work presented here is to demonstrate that certain contextual information, traditionally considered to be beyond the scope of semantic representations, can be formalised sufficiently to allow its use in natural language generation (NLG) decisions, in particular syntactic choice. This ‘pragmatic’ information, where the term pragmatic is interpreted as indicating any reference...

Language impairment is a common core feature in Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Many studies have tried to define the specific language profiles of these disorders, some claiming the existence of overlaps, and others conceiving of them as separate categories. Fewer have sought to determinewhether and how PDD-NOS language profile, including prosody...

objectives: language development is often very slower in hearing impaired children compared with their normal peers. hearing impairment during childhood affects all aspects of speech production and language acquisition. it seems that hearing impaired people suffer from language and speech impairments such as production of complex linguistic structures. the purpose of this study is to determine ...

Game theoretical analyses of communication (e.g. Lewis, Crawford & Sobel) demand cooperation between conversational partners for reliable information exchange to take place. Similarly, in pragmatics, the theory of language use, it is standard to assume that communication is a cooperative affair. Recently, this standard view has come under attack by Durcot and Merin, and it has been proposed tha...

the necessity of conducting more studies addressing the development of pragmatic profciency and strong pragmatic awareness for english language learners has made the role of instruction and feedback in teaching pragmatic knowledge of utmost importance. the present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of four types of instruction for teaching some pragmatic markers including topic change m...