Infants’ ability to detect patterns in speech input is central to their acquisition of language, and recent evidence suggests that their cognitive faculties may be specifically tailored to this task: Seven-month-olds reliably abstract rule-like structures (e.g., ABB vs. ABA) from speech, but not other stimuli. Here we ask what drives this speech advantage. Specifically, we propose that infants’...

Ten-month-old infants persistently search for a hidden object at its initial hiding place even after observing it being hidden at another location. Recent evidence suggests that communicative cues from the experimenter contribute to the emergence of this perseverative search error. We replicated these results with dogs (Canis familiaris), who also commit more search errors in ostensive-communic...

Infants intentionally communicate with others from before their 1st birthday. But there is some question about how they understand the communicative process. Do they understand that for their request to work the recipient must both understand the request and be cooperatively disposed to fulfill it? On the basis of the study by Shwe and Markman (1997), we developed a new paradigm that tested whe...

The form of representations is typically considered to be conditioned by three things: the nature and availability of domain regularities, the perceptual and cognitive abilities of individuals, and the properties of the medium used to construct a representation. This paper reports on an experimental investigation of a fourth constraint on representational form; communicative use. Subjects were ...

The overall goal of our research is the automatic recognition of the intended message of a grouped bar chart. This paper presents our preliminary work on a system that utilizes the communicative signals in a grouped bar chart as evidence in a Bayesian network that hypothesizes the primary message conveyed by the graphic. The paper discusses the kinds of communicative signals present in grouped ...

In this paper we propose a dialogue act annotation system allowing ranking of communicative functions of utterances in terms of their subjective importance. It is argued that multidimensional dialogue act annotation schemes, while allowing more than one tag per utterance, implicitly treat all functions as equally important. Consequently, they fail to capture the fact that in a given context som...

Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski (2007) present a comprehensive review of the infant pointing literature. They conclude that infant pointing demonstrates communicative intent from its onset, at about 1 year of age. In this commentary, it is noted that for infants to understand communicative intent, they must have a concept of self and others as intentional agents. Evidence is reviewed to ar...

76 This (the second of two articles) looks at some of the pedagogical aspects of the Communicative Approach, including the idea of a 'semantic syllabus' and the question of 'authenticity' in materials and methodology. It is argued that the Communicative Approach generally presents an over-simplified and misleading account of these issues, and that a sensible approach to language teaching involv...