This study investigated the effectiveness of using antecedent persuasive stimulation and response-contingent praise, within a small discussion group context, to modify the rate of verbal participation of Ss in an independent, classroom situation. Ss were 96 male college students who were divided into 12 treatment subgroups and 4 control subgroups of 6 Ss each. 3 treatment conditions were employ...

The generative enterprise in linguistics is roughly 50 years old, and it is reasonable to ask what progress the field has made in certain areas over the past five decades. This article will address the study of verbal argument structure. Research in generative linguistics without question has productively explored verbal argument structure within a general structuralist framework familiar from ...

This paper addresses the issue of designing embodied conversational agents that exhibit appropriate posture shifts during dialogues with human users. Previous research has noted the importance of hand gestures, eye gaze and head nods in conversations between embodied agents and humans. We present an analysis of human monologues and dialogues that suggests that postural shifts can be predicted a...

One approach that has been used to study processes that give rise to comprehension is to have readers verbally report their understanding during reading. The thoughts that readers produce usually contain multiple clauses that convey different kinds of processing strategies, such as paraphrasing, bridging, or elaborations. The goal of this study was to examine the structure of verbal protocols a...

This dissertation examines the syntax and argument structure of non-verbal predicates (focusing primarily on adjectives) in Tagalog. Drawing on evidence from a variety of construction types (including Comparative, Existential, and Ellipsis constructions among others), I argue against the claim that adjectives differ from verbs in their ability to project an internal theme argument (Pesetsky 198...

English verbal gerunds have long been of interest to syntacticians. Verbal gerund phrases display a mix of nominal and verbal properties which provide a challenge to any syntactic framework that assumes a strict version of X-bar theory. Various approaches have been proposed to get around these problems, but they all involve abandoning a fundamentally desirable theoretic assumption or adopting a...