This study investigated the impact of individual differences like language proficiency, gender and age on the Iranian EFL learners interlanguage pragmatics in institutional discourse especially, their capacity to recognize and to rate pragmatic and grammatical infelicities in speech act situations of request and apology.  To this end, one hundred and eighty-seven EFL university students at thre...

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...

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...

Critical to communicative success in this era of globalization are pragmatic awareness and competence. A promising instructional approach for attaining these traits is project-based learning (PBL), as it promotes the development problem-solving skills well deeper engagement course content. This paper describes how PBL was used a university-level intercultural communication sensitize learners pr...

Although investigators have proposed in various theories that the socialization of emotions has important implications for children's general competence, very little empirical data exist. In the present study, parents' responses to the emotional distress of their preschool children were examined in the context of more general dimensions of parenting (warmth and control), and the relation of the...