The ability of university Arab learners of English to draw inferences from English sentences

Abstract EN

This paper aims at investigating the ability of Arab learners of EFL to draw presuppositional and entailment inferences from English sentences containing factive and implicative verbs.

It was found that the ability of Arab learners of EFL, in this respect, is relatively high, compared with that of native speakers of English.

Drawing presuppositional inferences seemed to be more difficult for the subjects including native speakers of English.

Furthermore, drawing inferences from sentences containing semantically negative predicates was found more difficult than was the case in semantically positive predicates.

The performance of native speakers was consistently higher than that of Arab learners of English.