The role of visual salience on utterance form was investigated in a picture description study. Participants heard spoken questions about animate or inanimate entities in a picture and produced a relative clause in response. Visual properties of the scenes affected production choices such that less salient inanimate entities tended to yield longer initiation latencies and to be described with pa...

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 ...

In the present study, two different models of task complexity; namely, limited attentional capacity model and cognition hypothesis were examined. To this end, the manipulation of cognitive task complexity along +/- single task dimension on Iranian EFL learners’ production in terms of fluency was explored. Based on the results of the writing test of TOFEL (2004), 48 learners were selected as the...

Based on Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis, this study explored the effects of task complexity on the lexical complexity of Iranian EFL students’ argumentative writing.This study was designed to explore the manipulation of cognitive task complexity along +/-single task dimension (a resource dispersing dimension in Robinson’s triadic framework) on Iranian EFL learners’ production in term of lexica...

Spontaneous language has rarely been subjected to neuroimaging studies. This study therefore introduces a newly developed method for the analysis of linguistic phenomena observed in continuous language production during fMRI. Most neuroimaging studies investigating language have so far focussed on single word or - to a smaller extent - sentence processing, mostly due to methodological considera...

BACKGROUND Although memory impairment is the main symptom of Alzheimer's disease (AD), language impairment can be an important marker. Relatively few studies of language in AD quantify the impairments in connected speech using computational techniques. OBJECTIVE We aim to demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy in automatically identifying Alzheimer's disease from short narrative samples elicit...