The purpose of this study was to examine Cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from L2 [English] to L1 [Persian]) in refusals to invitations. It explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in L1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of EFL learners. The participants were Persi...

the purpose of this study was to examine cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from l2 [english] to l1 [persian]) in refusals to invitations. it explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in l1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of efl learners. the participants were persi...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is traditionally associated with motor symptoms. However, impairments in language functioning may also accompany this disorder. The present study investigated pragmatic language deficits in PD and their relationship to cognitive functioning. Forty patients with PD were compared to ageand IQ-matched controls on measures of pragmatic language functioning using the Test of...

We aimed to disentangle contributions of socio-pragmatic and structural language deficits to narrative competence by comparing the narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 25), non-autistic children with language impairments (LI; n = 23), and children with typical development (TD; n = 27). Groups were matched for age (6½ to 15 years; mean: 10;6) and non-verbal ability; ASD...

This study aims to examine the cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of rapport management strategies (rapport enhancement, rapport maintenance, rapport neglect, and rapport challenge) in the complaints during service encounters based on Spencer Oatey’s (2008) model. To this end, 90 participants (30 Persian native speakers, 30 Iranian EFL (English as a foreign language) learner...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

An important strand of inquiry in second language acquisition (SLA) research is that devoted to the investigation of language learners’ successive approximations of the target language, referred to as interlanguage (IL) in the SLA literature. Similarly to the practice in other kinds of linguistic investigation, SLA researchers are concerned with empirical description of various kinds of interla...

Recent experimental evidence suggests that adults incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of pragmatic implicatures. Developmental studies report that 5-year-old children also succeed in taking speaker knowledge into account in implicature computation, but 4-year-olds fail. The present study investigated the pragmatic competence of 4year-olds, specifically the ability to incorporate s...