This paper presents an analysis of dysfluencies in two oral retellings of a familiar children’s story by a young boy with autism. Thurber & Tager-Flusberg (1993) postulate a lower degree of cognitive and communicative investment to explain a lower frequency of non-grammatical pauses observed in elicited narratives of children with autism in comparison to typically developing and intellectually ...

The spontaneous index finger and other referential pointing in 3 adult, laboratory chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) who have not received language training is reported. Of 256 total observed points, 254 were emitted in the presence of a human to objects in the environment; therefore, the points were communicative. Indicators of intentional communication used by the subjects included attention-gett...

A debated issue in the relationship between language and thought is how our linguistic abilities are involved in understanding the intentions of others ('mentalizing'). The results of both theoretical and empirical work have been used to argue that linguistic, and more specifically, grammatical, abilities are crucial in representing the mental states of others. Here we contribute to this debate...

This study investigates the validity of a writing model proposed as the underlying structure of the writing skill in English as a foreign language (EFL). Four writing prompts were administered to 178 Iranian EFL learners. The scripts were then scored according to writing benchmarks similar to the IELTS Writing criteria but narrower in scope. After interand intra-rater reliability analysis, a th...

The aim of this paper is to present a specification of speaker's communicative acts of utterances to be carried out gradually by using contextual and cotexual informations. Communicative act is defined as a communicative goal or aim which can be expressed in language L by a distinctive set of conventional cue patterns in specified discourse contexts. In our case, the communicative acts are clas...

26 Janet Creaser, Department of Mechanical Engineering Evaluation of Minnesota’s

The ability to measure population health trends and improvements can be enhanced through collaborative efforts to describe existing knowledge and via shared development opportunities. This paper highlights a project undertaken in Alberta which has created an inventory of health status indicators in use in the province, and provides a framework for strategic progress in the development and use o...

People can communicate by using hand actions, e.g., signs. Understanding communicative actions requires that the observer knows that the actor has an intention to communicate and the meanings of the actions. Here, we investigated how this prior knowledge affects processing of observed actions. We used functional MRI to determine changes in action processing when non-signers were told that the o...