The present study sought to investigate the comprehension of Garden-Path structures by Iranian EFL learners. 50 female students of Kharazmi English Language Institute in Karaj participated in this study. All of the participants were native speakers of Persian studying in Kharazmi English language institute in Karaj, Iran. They ranged from 18 to 30 in terms of age. The participants were administ...

The role of teachers in affecting students’ attitudes and motivations to language learning and teaching cannot be denied. To improve the field of foreign language teaching and learning we need to improve the qualities of EFL teachers. To achieve this goal, recognizing and identifying the qualities of effective EFL teachers is essential. So this study attempted to investigate the view points of ...

This paper investigates the use of promptbased content features for the automated assessment of spontaneous speech in a spoken language proficiency assessment. The results show that single highest performing promptbased content feature measures the number of unique lexical types that overlap with the listening materials and are not contained in either the reading materials or a sample response,...

This study explores the construct of lexical sophistication and its applications for measuring second language lexical and speaking proficiency. In doing so, the study introduces the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of LExical Sophistication (TAALES), which calculates text scores for 135 classic and newly developed lexical indices related to word frequency, range, bigram and trigram frequency, a...

The present study examined to what extent proficiency in a non-native language influences speech perception in noise. We explored how English proficiency affected native (Swedish) and non-native (English) speech perception in four speech reception threshold (SRT) conditions, including two energetic (stationary, fluctuating noise) and two informational (two-talker babble Swedish, two-talker babb...

This paper describes a novel method to improve the performance of second language speech recognition when the mother tongue of users is known. Considering that second language speech usually includes less fluent pronunciation and more frequent pronunciation mistakes, I propose using a reduced phoneme set generated by a phonetic decision tree (PDT)-based top-down sequential splitting method inst...

It remains to be elucidated how cortical activations are modulated by factors of age, proficiency, and language task demands when mastering first language (L1) and a second language (L2). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested subjects aged 13 (the age 13 group) and 19 (the age 19 group), thereby comparing the cortical activations involved in past-tense verb identification with ...

In 2000 Census microdata, various outcomes of second-generation immigrants are related to their parents' age at arrival to the United States, and in particular whether that age fell within the "critical period" of language acquisition. We interpret this as an effect of the parent's English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for parental English proficiency. Estimates of the ...

An EEG coherence study was performed with a twofold objective: first, to scrutinize the theoretical concept of "cortical efficiency" in connection with second language (L2) acquisition and, second, to detect cooperations between cortical areas in specific frequency bands indicative for highly proficient L2 processing. Two groups differing only in their level of L2 proficiency were contrasted du...