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...

To confirm the language independency of a communicative prosody generation from input word impression vector, we synthesized communicative Mandarin speech using prosodic characteristics of communicative Japanese speech. The fundamental frequency and duration characteristics of oneword “n” utterances of Japanese were copied to Mandarin through input word attributes. From the subjective impressio...

Communication is an essential skill for cooperative tasks, yet neuroevolved agents struggle to develop communicative behaviour. In fact, it has been shown that communicating agents are sometimes outperformed by noncommunicating ones on tasks that ostensibly require communication. In our paper, we explore mechanisms which could aid agents in developing communication through evolution. Specifical...

In this paper we describe Lokutor, a virtual human. Lokutor is a partially autonomous agent, living a 3D virtual environment. The agent can be controlled via natural language directives of the user (spoken or typed in) and by direct manipulation using a gra cal user interface. Its control system consists of a behavior-based reactive layer, a deliberative control layer and an motivational subsys...