Verbal overshadowing refers to a phenomenon whereby verbalization of non-verbal stimuli (e.g., facial features) during the maintenance phase (after the target information is no longer available from the sensory inputs) impairs subsequent non-verbal recognition accuracy. Two primary mechanisms have been proposed for verbal overshadowing, namely the recoding interference hypothesis, and the trans...

We address the problem of bootstrapping language acquisition for an artificial system similarly to what is observed in experiments with human infants. Our method works by associating meanings to words in manipulation tasks, as a robot interacts with objects and listens to verbal descriptions of the interactions. The model is based on an affordance network, i.e., a mapping between robot actions,...

We propose functional specifications for a localized verbal wayfinding aid for blind pedestrians, in simple and structured urban areas. A user-centered design approach, that is, the analyses of route descriptions produced by blind pedestrians, allowed first to evidence verbal guidance rules and then to elaborate route descriptions of unfamiliar paths; their efficiency was confirmed. We found th...

Natural language descriptions of visual media present interesting problems for linguistic annotation of spatial information. This paper explores the use of ISO-Space, an annotation specification to capturing spatial information, for encoding spatial relations mentioned in descriptions of images. Especially, we focus on the distinction between references to representational content and structura...

Earth scientists have always been interested in the description and analysis of surfaces, particularly those which serve to describe mapped data. The methods used in this context fall into two categories, written descriptions (using terms such as dip, strike, plunge, isoclinal folding, attitude of axial plane, iaiiation etc.1 and mathematical approximations. To overcome the inadequacies of verb...

This work in progress study presents a syntactic-level analysis of gestures in communication through annotated line graphs in time domain. As distinct from the gesture analysis at discourse level, the syntactic gesture analysis is based on solely physical properties of the gestures, such as direction, size or position. The results revealed strong relationship between gestures, verbal descriptio...

In the literature on verbal human-computer interaction there is general consent that humans’ preconceptualisations of the machine’s capabilities lead to conceptual and syntactic simplifications of the language used. We present a Wizard of Oz / Confederate study where humans communicate with either a system or an expert in a localization task in a complex building, in a setting which encourages ...

The paper presents the initial, basic step in extension of PolNet (Polish WordNet) with verbs. This step consists in formatting the source data necessary for final computerassisted creation of verbal synsets including valency information. An algorithm for compiling verb descriptions contained in two human-oriented dictionaries into a computer tractable electronic resource is presented.

An imagery task was used to explore the distinction between visual memory representations that preserve surface features and more abstract descriptions. Subjects were shown two line drawings and were then asked to combine a visual image of each drawing in order to identify a novel figure. The main experimental manipulation concerned the contrast in which each drawing was shown, which was either...

The four studies reported here sought to explore the nature of the construct of mind-mindedness. In Study 1, involving 37 mothers of 5- to 8-year-old children, mothers' verbal mind-minded descriptions of their children were positively correlated with their mind-minded descriptions of their current romantic partner. Participants in Studies 2 (N=114), 3 (N=173), and 4 (N=153) were young adults wh...