The elaboration of the theoretical notion of communicative competence reflects a growing awareness of the importance of pragmatic knowledge in achieving mastery of a second language. Such awareness includes the recognition that teaching language effectively includes teaching culture in the most fundamental sense. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics to link theoretical work on ...

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relat...

This study documents age trends, interrelations, and correlates of intellectual abilities in old and very old age (70-103 years) from the Berlin Aging Study (N = 516). Fourteen tests were used to assess 5 abilities: reasoning, memory, and perceptual speed from the mechanic (broad fluid) domain and knowledge and fluency from the pragmatic (broad crystallized) domain. Intellectual abilities had n...

In two experiments, we aimed to show the importance of task characteristics in scalar implicature production. In Experiment 1, we found that five-year-olds were significantly more pragmatic when given an Action-Based Task (ABT), in which they had to respond by performing an action than in a Truth-Value Judgement Task (TVJT), in which they had to evaluate the truth-value of statements. Experimen...

Pragmatic competence i.e., the ability to understand intended meaning is a long standing challenge in communication. This work proposes a computational framework for pragmatic inference that is based on reasoning by taking into account the realistic assumption that any communication could be deceptive and that intentions can be reflected in language use. Pragmatic inference is examined under th...

One of the provisions of the health care reform legislation in 2010 was for funding pragmatic clinical trials or large observational studies for comparing the effectiveness of different approved medical treatments, involving broadly representative patient populations. After reviewing pragmatic clinical trials and the issues and challenges that have made them just a small fraction of comparative...

VieCtoS is a system producing spoken utterances in German from information stored in a database. An important aspect of the system is the use of information relevant for intonation at all stages of the generation process. Prosodic features are derived from pragmatic information available in the strategic generator, and transformed by the tactical generator into features that can be interpreted ...

Broad Research Program My philosophical research aims to develop a general theory of pragmatic embodied epistemology. Pragmatic embodied epistemology is the philosophical investigation of the possibility conditions and normative principles for embodied agents to represent their world and to utilize the representations in their interactions with the world. Pragmatic embodied epistemology differs...

In recent years, so-called "effectiveness studies," also called "real-world studies" or "pragmatic trials," have gained increasing importance in the context of evidence-based medicine. These studies follow less restrictive methodological standards than phase III studies in terms of patient selection, comedication, and other design issues, and their results should therefore be better generalizab...

Clinical trials have been the main tool used by the health sciences community to test and evaluate interventions, Trials can fall into two broad categories: pragmatic and explanatory. Pragmatic trials are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in real-life routine practice conditions, whereas explanatory trials aim to test whether an intervention works under optimal situations....