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...

The purpose of this study was to compare the impact of clickers, the communicative approach and the lecture method on the communicative competence development of learners who were taught English a second language (ESL). Ninety nine pupils from three primary schools participated in the study. Quasi-experimental nonrandomised pre-test posttest control group design was adopted for the study. A bat...

THERE IS A VAST AMOUNT OF POTENTIAL MAPPINGS BETWEEN BEHAVIORS AND INTENTIONS IN COMMUNICATION: a behavior can indicate a multitude of different intentions, and the same intention can be communicated with a variety of behaviors. Humans routinely solve these many-to-many referential problems when producing utterances for an Addressee. This ability might rely on social cognitive skills, for insta...

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a developmental disorder characterized by regression of purposeful hand skills and spoken language, although some affected children retain some ability to speech. We assessed the communicative abilities of five young girls, who were later diagnosed with the preserved speech variant of RTT, during the pre-regression period (aged 12-24 months). Videotapes, obtained by paren...

In everyday communication, people not only use speech but also hand gestures to convey information. One intriguing question in gesture research has been why gestures take the specific form they do. Previous research has identified the speaker-gesturer’s communicative intent as one factor shaping the form of iconic gestures. Here we investigate whether communicative intent also shapes the form o...

This study was conducted to examine interpersonal predictive coding in individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA). Healthy and HFA participants observed point-light displays of two agents (A and B) performing separate actions. In the 'communicative' condition, the action performed by agent B responded to a communicative gesture performed by agent A. In the 'individual' condition, agent A's ...

Being able to comprehend communicative intentions and to recognize whether such intentions are directed toward us or not is extremely important in social interaction. Two brain systems, the mentalizing and the mirror neuron system, have been proposed to underlie intention recognition. However, little is still known about how the systems cooperate within the process of communicative intention un...

We present a definiteness annotation scheme that captures the semantic, pragmatic, and discourse information associated with noun phrases, which we call communicative functions. A survey of the linguistics literature suggests that definiteness does not express a single communicative function but is a grammaticalization of many such functions, for example, identifiability, familiarity, uniquenes...

This paper highlights the folk perception of impoliteness among Ghanaians in view of Watts’ (2003) notion of first order impoliteness. The study showed that impoliteness is not just an opposite of politeness, but the manifestation of non-cooperation, disapproval, and mutual antipathy through certain communicative behaviours that signal disrespect. These communicative behaviours include ‘interru...