فاطمه نعمتی

The distinction between acquiring English as a native and foreign language is significant and cannot be neglected since the latter happens typically in young adulthood with limited exposure to the target language, leading to developing subtly different perceptions of words' intensity compared to English native speakers. Among these words, scalar adjectives can be more perplexing for EFL learners since they have near-synonymous meanings that cannot be differentiated without perceiving the cultural and emotional background associated with them. This research was, thus, conducted to firstly investigate the judgments of EFL learners of scalar adjectives intensity and scalarity compared to those of English native speakers, and secondly find the more reliable method of collecting these judgments, particularly focusing on the Best-Worst judgments and numeric rating scales. To accomplish these purposes, a list of adjectives scale extracted from the gold standard (de Melo and Bansal, 2013) was selected to be judged by a total of 64 advanced-level EFL learners and 64 English native speakers. Both groups were further divided into two groups of numeric rating scale and Best-Worst Scale. At the outset, all the participants were instructed to fill out a LEAP-Q. The numeric rating groups were asked to rate the intensity of the adjectives on a scale of 1 to 9 while Best-Worst Scale groups were required to select the most and least intense adjective. To achieve the first aim of the study, the gathered intensity score and the yielded rank for each adjective on the scale were compared between the two groups of EFL learners and English native speakers. The ANOVA and mixed-effects regression models were conducted on the obtained intensity score, which indicated a significant difference between EFL learners’ and English native speakers’ judgment of scalar adjective intensity. To find any noteworthy differences between the judged rank scale of adjectives with each other and the Gold stand