No abstract

Across two tasks, the sensitivity of Persian learners of English as a Foreign Language (PLEFL) to the impact of discourse factors on the dative alternation is tested. In Task 1, elicited production data from both native speakers of English and the PLEFL at different levels of proficiency shows that neither group's responses are affected by the discourse factors. The native speakersÕ performance can only be meaningfully interpreted when individual verbs are brought into consideration; the Persian learners, excluding the elementary ones, who consistently produce prepositional datives, echo the construction in the question. In Task 2, data from acceptability judgements show that the native speakers, advanced and high-intermediate subjects prefer the responses with a Given-New order. The incongruity between the two tasks is attributed to the nature of the tasks. Additionally, evidence is provided for the existence of a very specific developmental sequence in the acquisition of the interaction between discourse factors and dative alternation. The consequences of the findings of this study for perspectives on interlanguage are discussed.

The current study examined the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Persian is a relatively unique data point in crosslinguistic research in acquisition because it is a head-final language with post-nominal RCs. Children (N = 51) aged 2 to 7 years completed a picture-selection task that tested their comprehension of subject-, object-, and genitive-RCs. The results showed that the children experienced greater difficulty processing object and genitive RCs when compared to subject RCs, suggesting that the children have particular difficulty processing sentences with non-canonical word order. The results are discussed with reference to a number of theoretical accounts proposed to account for sentence difficulty

The current study investigated the role of resumption in the interpretation of object relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Sixty-four (N=64) children aged 3;2-6;0 (M=4;8) completed a referent selection task that tested their comprehension of subject RCs, gapped object RCs, and object RCs containing either a resumptive pronoun or an object clitic. The results showed that the presence of a resumptive element (pronoun or clitic) had a facilitative effect on children's processing of object RCs. In both cases object RCs with resumptive elements were interpreted more accurately than gapped subject and object RCs, suggesting that resumptive elements ease processing burden in syntactically complex contexts because they provide local cues to thematic role assignment.

In recent years, gloss presentation format or the location where a gloss appears with respect to its related target word has received renewed attention. Research suggested that different gloss presentation formats could have differential effects on reading comprehension and/or vocabulary learning. This study hypothesized that the effectiveness of different computerized gloss presentation formats in reading comprehension could be explained by drawing on the split-attention effect within the framework of cognitive load theory. The effect predicts that when two related sources of information are physically separated (e.g., a target word and the respective gloss), cognitive resources are unnecessarily wasted, and learning is hindered. To test this hypothesis, 39 Persianspeaking L2 learners of English were divided into two experimental conditions, each being exposed to a text enhanced with either in-text or marginal glosses. Two measures of reading comprehension and three measures of cognitive load were employed. The participants' initial differences in terms of grammatical knowledge and vocabulary size were balanced out, and their lookup behavior was also tracked. The results revealed that the participants with access to in-text glosses, compared with those with marginal glosses, experienced lower levels of cognitive load due to the elimination of split-attention and, accordingly, performed better on the reading comprehension measures. Given the participants' L2 proficiency level, the findings suggested that a text enhanced with in-text glosses tends to be instructionally more efficient.