English intonation can be difficult for L2 speakers to learn, particularly for those whose L1 intonation system works differently from English. This study investigates whether Hong Kong English (HKE) speakers whose L1 is Cantonese have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in specific contexts. Results from an intonation pattern selection tasks indicate that HKE speakers (n =...

Metadiscourse markers help writers make coherent and reader- friendly texts, thus of considerable importance in academic writing. The main aim of this study was to investigate how interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers are used by Iranian EFL learners. An inquiry was carried out to investigate cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse markers in the Di...

In this study, I carried out a quasi-experimental task that attempted to examine some aspects of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis; namely, the extent to which the grammar of one’s language affects one’s way of thinking about the experienced world. A task was designed to evaluate the influence that language operates on the mind of native English and Korean speakers in the categorization of spatial act...

In this article, researchers set out to discover the metadiscourse markers in research articles written by both native and non-native English speakers. To this end, a total number of twenty research articles published by Iranian and native English speakers in highly reputed journals on Arts and Humanities domains were randomly selected from major databases including Science Direct, Noormagz, an...

metadiscourse markers help writers make coherent and reader- friendly texts, thus of considerable importance in academic writing. the main aim of this study was to investigate how interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers are used by iranian efl learners. an inquiry was carried out to investigate cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse markers in the di...

lf as the grammatical locus of semantic interpretation in minimalism implies that lf is the only level at which any structural condition can be checked. accordingly, cross over effects provides some evidence for the existence of lf. to provide further evidence for the universality of cross over effects at lf, a comparative research between persian-english, turkish-english and persian-turkish ha...

There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learne...

English vowel productions were acoustically examined in a group of native Mandarin speakers. The first and second formant frequencies (F1 & F2) of 11 English vowels were examined in the syllable-level productions of 40 Mandarin speakers compared to 40 American English speakers. Results of the comparative acoustic analysis indicated that the Mandarin speakers differed significantly from the Amer...

An analysis of word duration in English sentences uttered by native speakers of Japanese is made, in which the difference in prosodic patterns between the English and Japanese languages is taken into account. The durations of Japanese speakers are compared with those of English speakers in regard to a percentage distribution of an individual word relative to all words in a sentence. The results...