Introduction Natural language instructions, though prevalent in many spheres of communication, have only recently begun to receive attention within computational linguistics[5]. Instructions are often accompanied by language intended to signal repetition of the action that they instruct. In order to develop a system that is able to understand instructions, with the goal of executing them, it is...

INTRODUCTION Most of the studies that have examined cognitive and executive functions in conduct disorders (CD) have been conducted on institutionalized male adolescents. In this research the cognitive and executive functions of non-institutionalized Colombian school children with CD were compared with normal school children, all between 6 and 12 years-old. MATERIALS AND METHODS We used a cas...

Imitation in the form of repeating speech sounds, accents, and words plays a foundational role in the normal acquisition and development of language (Meltzoff et al., 2009; Adank et al., 2013) eventually contributing to a life-long fine-tuning of communication skills (Tannen, 1987; Delvaux and Soquet, 2007). Imitation of prosodic and paralinguistic features may be intentional in certain context...

Continuous repetition of a word causes listeners to hear the word transform into other utterances, an illusion known as the verbal transformation effect. Node structure theory (MacKay, 1987) provides a useful framework for understanding the illusion, positing that the transformations listeners report are a function of the stability of the node that represents the repeating stimulus. In Experime...

The course of myoclonic astatic epileptic syndrome (MAES) is variable and little information is available about cortical functions in the presence of the disease. The objective of the present study was to assess the phonological working memory (PWM) and the verbal language of six patients between 8 and 18 years old, on treatment for at least 5 years, and good control of seizures, diagnosed in t...

In 3 experiments, auditory massed repetition was used to examine age-related differences in habituation by means of the verbal transformation paradigm. Participants heard 10 words (5 high frequency and 5 low frequency), each presented 180 times, and they reported perceived changes in the repeated words (verbal transformations). In these experiments, older adults reported fewer illusory percepts...

Alignment of communicative behaviour is an important feature Human–Human interaction that directly affects the collaboration and social connection conversational partners. With aim improving abilities a virtual agent, in particular its strategies related to (lexical) verbal alignment, this article focuses on alignment linguistic productions dialogue participants task-oriented dialogues. We prop...

Background: Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children’s sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of Specific Language Impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. Aims: The study aims to: i) evaluate the effects of different types of long-term linguisti...