Language students are most engaged while reading texts at an appropriate difficulty level. However, existing methods of evaluating text difficulty focus mainly on vocabulary and do not prioritize grammatical features, hence they do not work well for language learners with limited knowledge of grammar. In this paper, we introduce grammatical templates, the expert-identified units of grammar that...

This study examined abstract syntactic categorization in infants, using the case of grammatical gender. Ninety-six French-learning 14-, 17-, 20-, and 30-month-olds completed the study. In a preferential looking procedure infants were tested on their generalized knowledge of grammatical gender involving pseudonouns and gender-marking determiners. The pseudonouns were controlled to contain no pho...

It is generally assumed that speakers of grammatical gender languages consider grammatical gender arbitrary, but this assumption has never been tested. Research shows that the grammatical gender of nouns can affect perceptions of the masculinity or femininity of the noun's referent in speakers of languages with masculine and feminine noun classes. However, bilingualism facilitates the developme...

The present study examined the acquisition of anaphora in English by Iranian EFL learners as well as Persian speaking children. To do so, the study was conducted in three phases. In the first phase, 40 intermediate female and male EFL learners were selected from Puyan Institute in Takestan, Iran. Then, an off-line based Grammatical Judgment Task was administered. In the second phase, 40 female ...

the present research aims to examine the effect of task-based syllabus and contrastive analysis of nominal and verbal phrases in persian and lari languages on enhancing persian knowledge of lari speakers. to do so, a sample of 60 subjects in second year of elementary school was selected through multistage and purposive sampling. then, they were divided into two thirty-student groups, one experi...

This study explored lexical-syntactic information - syntactic information that is stored in the lexicon - and its relation to syntactic and lexical impairments in aphasia. We focused on two types of lexical-syntactic information: predicate argument structure (PAS) of verbs (the number and types of arguments the verb selects) and grammatical gender of nouns. The participants were 17 Hebrew-speak...