Speech conveys communicative meanings by encoding functional contrasts. The contrasts are realized through articulation, a biomechanical process with specific constraints. Phonology, phonetics or any other theories of speech therefore cannot be autonomous from either communicative functions or biophysical mechanisms. Successful speech modeling can be achieved only if communicative functions and...

Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) often show communicative-pragmatic deficits involving different expressive modalities, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic. Most previous research has evaluated pragmatic ability using linguistic tasks only, while the extralinguistic aspects of communication have received less attention. The aim of the present study was to provide a mu...

This paper addresses three topics on functionality that should be incorporated into planning formalisms so that they can: (1) respect limitations of the recipient's working memory; (2) rely on the recipient's inferences to achieve communicative goals; and (3) deliberately violate normally-respected conversational rules to achieve a communicative e ect. The argument is that a planner for communi...

The present study investigated whether young children are better at representing others’ false beliefs in communicative situations than in standard false belief tasks. Younger (3.7–4.6 year-olds, n = 18), middle-aged (4.7–5.6 year-olds, n = 20), and older children (5.7–6.6 year-olds, n = 20) completed both standard false belief and communicative tasks having the same story structure. Although t...

This article discusses a range of current issues and future research possibilities in Communicative Language Testing (CLT) using, as its departure point, the key questions which emerged during the CLT symposium at the 2010 Language Testing Forum (LTF). The paper begins with a summary of the 2010 symposium discussion in which three main issues related to CLT are identified: (1) the “mainstreamin...

The linguistic-communicative paradigm offers some interesting perspectives in a context where the perception of patient needs is considered a critical step in high-quality care. This study describes healthcare organizations as linguistic communities based on the conceptual framework of Habermas' communicative action theory. Four communicative models are present in healthcare settings: objectify...

Dialogue systems need to be able to understand a user’s communicative intentions, reason with those intentions, form their own communicative intentions, and realize those intentions with actual language to be uttered to the user. Oftentimes in dialogue systems, however, what these communicative intentions actually correspond to is never clearly defined. We propose a descriptive model of dialogu...

In order for a model of rational agency to be used for multi-agent social interaction, the model must be extended to account for communicative behaviors that are ineecient for one agent, but which increase the eeciency of the interaction of two agents in a dialogue. In this paper, we argue that naturally occurring communicative behaviors are often directed at the resource limits of the other ag...

Pointing movements can serve instrumental goals (‘pointing to press a button’) or communicative goals (‘pointing to indicate to someone which button to press’). Previous work has shown that communicative pointing follows different trajectories, and has different end points than instrumental pointing movements, depending on the addressee’s spatial location. This suggests that motor control proce...