Background/Purpose: Second/foreign language learners face problems in different areas such as correct word usage, grammatical accuracy, and pronunciation fluency. This paper responds to one of these by investigating the impact strategic Google Search on Iranian English a foreign (EFL) learners’ grammar learning.
 
 Methodology: Sixty intermediate EFL from private institute Isfahan, Ir...

We introduce a new type of transduction grammar that allows for learning of probabilistic phrasal bilexica, leading to a significant improvement in spoken language translation accuracy. The current state-of-the-art in statistical machine translation relies on a complicated and crude pipeline to learn probabilistic phrasal bilexica—the very core of any speech translation system. In this paper, w...

The Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) posits that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) can be largely explained by abnormalities of brain structures that subserve procedural memory. The PDH predicts impairments of procedural memory itself, and that such impairments underlie the grammatical deficits observed in the disorder. Previous studies have indeed reported procedural learning impairments i...

Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to implicitly extract regularities in the environment, and likely supports various higher-order behaviors, from language to music and vision. While specific patterns experience are likely to influence SL outcomes, this ability is tacitly conceptualized as a fixed construct, and few studies to date have investigated how experience may shape statistical le...

This paper investigates whether Chomsky-like grammar representations are useful for learning cost-effective, comprehensible predictors of members of biological sequence families. The Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) Bayesian approach to learning from positive examples is used to generate a grammar for recognising a class of proteins known as human neuropeptide precursors (NPPs). Collectively, ...

Several studies have found learning of biconditional grammars only under intentional rule-search conditions (e.g., Johnstone & Shanks, 2001). Memorization of strings merely led to the learning of chunks. We used a musical grammar, a diatonic inversion, that is a type of biconditional grammar. Participants either were required to memorize a set of grammatical tunes (incidental learning), or were...

This quasi-experimental study examined the effects of input-based, meaning-based output (MO) and traditional instruction (TI) on EFL learners’ grammar learning. To this end, 120 junior high school students were selected from 4 intact classes. Each class was assigned to an instructional condition, that is, textual enhancement (TE), input flood (IF), MO, and TI. Before the treatment, a multiple-c...