The present paper endeavours to investigate whether L1 Persian speakers are sensitive to a ‘poverty of the stimulus’ situation in English: the asymmetrical constraint on piedpiping and stranding constructions. Both prepositions and particles can be stranded in interrogatives and relative clauses, but only prepositional phrases can appear in piedpiping structures. In contrast, Persian licenses p...

This paper describes the systems submitted by FBK for the MT track of IWSLT 2013. We participated in the EnglishFrench as well as the bidirectional Persian-English translation tasks. We report substantial improvements in our English-French systems over last year’s baselines, largely due to improved techniques of combining translation and language models. For our Persian-English and English-Pers...

This study describes  working  memory and developing and validating of an  L1 Persian reading span test for the measurement of working  memory of L1 Persian EFL learners. The test, which included  64  Persian  sentences,  was  developed  based  on  Daneman  and Carpenter’s (1980) reading  span  test.  The  shortcomings  of  the  test  were  identified  and  removed  over  three  pilot studies  ...

We present the Jinan Chinese Learner Corpus, a large collection of L2 Chinese texts produced by learners that can be used for educational tasks. The present work introduces the data and provides a detailed description. Currently, the corpus contains approximately 6 million Chinese characters written by students from over 50 different L1 backgrounds. This is a large-scale corpus of learner Chine...

WordNet is used extensively as a major lexical resource in information retrieval tasks. However, the qualities of existing Persian WordNets are far from perfect. They are either constructed manually which limits the coverage of Persian words, or automatically which results in unsatisfactory precision. This paper presents a fully-automated approach for constructing a Persian WordNet: A Bayesian ...

this is a longitudinal case study of two farsi-speaking children learning english: ‘bernard’ and ‘melissa’, who were 7;4 and 8;4 at the start of data collection. the research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language (l2) acquisition of syntax regarding the presence or absence of copula as a functional category, as well as the role and degree of l1 influe...

This experimental study investigated the learners’ integrative acquisition of obligatory overt subjects and subject-verb clause agreement in English as an L2. In L1 acquisition research, correlations between superficially unrelated linguistic phenomena are analyzed in terms of integrative effects. For instance, in English L1 acquisition, there is evidence for an integrative appearance of subjec...

this study aimed to examine cross-cultural differences in performing refusal of requests between persian native speakers (pnss) and english native speakers (enss) in terms of the frequency of the semantic formulas. also examined in this study was whether persian efl learners would transfer their l1 refusal patterns into the l2, and if there would be a relation between their proficiency level an...