Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the "mirror neurons system"). However, this view does not explain how these conventions could develop in the first place. Here we target the neglected but crucial issue of how people organize their non-verbal behavior to commu...

The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and communicative to artificial. Saccadic reaction times (SRTs...

The investigation of the ability to perceive, recognize, and judge upon social intentions, such as communicative intentions, on the basis of body motion is a growing research area. Cross-cultural differences in ability to perceive and interpret biological motion, however, have been poorly investigated so far. Progress in this domain strongly depends on the availability of suitable stimulus mate...

Despite the ambiguity inherent in human communication, people are remarkably efficient in establishing mutual understanding. Studying how people communicate in novel settings provides a window into the mechanisms supporting the human competence to rapidly generate and understand novel shared symbols, a fundamental property of human communication. Previous work indicates that the right posterior...

Ern} o Téglás,1,2 Anna Gergely,3 Krisztina Kupán,2 Ádám Miklósi,3 and József Topál2,* 1Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Hattyú 14, 1051 Budapest, Hungary 2Comparative Behavioural Research Group, Research Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Victor Hugo Street, 18-22, 1132 Budapest, Hungary 3Department of Ethology, Loránd Eötvös University, Pázmány P...

In the search for an understanding of human communication, researchers often try to isolate listener and speaker roles and study them separately. Others claim that it is the intertwinedness of these roles that makes human communication special. This close relationship between listener and speaker has been characterized by concepts such as common ground, backchanneling, and alignment, but they a...

This article offers a conceptual framework for integrated analysis of subprocesses in action and language, based on goal-directed action. Anatomical substrates are discussed in the companion paper (Arbib and Bota, 2003) which approaches “Integrative Models of Broca’s Area and the Ventral Premotor Cortex” within the context of explaining why the evolution of the human brain yielded mechanisms wh...

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying routine or regularized discourse and its connections to the many institutions within which people act. This interest has emerged for a number of reasons, including the rapid evolution of digitally mediated communication and the upheaval of organizational structures in such realms of activity as business, government, and e...

A communicative robot “BUGNOID” that integrates various sensory data and behavior modules is introduced with some experimental results. For the achievement of flexible communication with humans, the robot has multimodal interface holding diverse channels of communication. Moreover, the robot can recognize the environment taking a human’s behavior into account in order to co-exist with them.