This is an examination of two kinds of conversations that parents and children sometimes have about television programs: first, conversations in which parents and children seek and/or exchange information about some aspect of reality portrayed or referred to on television; second, conversations in which family members discuss the appropriateness or inappropriateness of behavior shown or mention...

The purpose of the study was to examine the contribution made by dimensions of session-impact factors (depth and smoothness), end-of-session factors of client's mood (positivity and emotional arousal), and several textual variables (use of positive and negative emotional words; helper's and client's writing lengths) to perceived helpfulness of emotional support conversations carried on by train...

This paper describes GroupBanter, a tool for supporting serendipitous group conversations using instant messaging. We investigated the potential of ephemeral group conversations by providing awareness of friends’ IM conversations, serving as an implicit invitation to join a group conversation. We present our vision and describe our prototype system. Results from two field studies carried out in...

There remains some debate regarding secondary task distractions, such as cell phones, as a risk factor in traffic crashes and their relative risk compared to existing factors, such as engagement in common in-vehicle tasks and alcohol impairment. Moreover, studies of driver impairment often investigate single risk factors rather than combined factors (e.g. distraction task while drunk). This stu...

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE To explore the use of direct video-based review for administration of the LaTrobe Communication Questionnaire (LCQ), and explore use of the LCQ as a tool for identifying and prioritizing targets for partner-based intervention. RESEARCH DESIGN Between-groups design comparing self- vs partner ratings of social communication behaviours in conversation and qualitative analysis o...

the present study is an attempt to investigate the use of vague expressions by intermediate efl learners. more specifically, the current study focuses on the structures and functions of one of the most common categories of vague language, i.e. general extenders. the data include a 22-hour corpus of english-as-a-foreign-language conversations. a comparison is also made between this corpus and a ...

Placing ourselves within the tradition of dynamic semantic approaches to discourse in natural language Kamp and Reyle (1993), Groenendjik and Stokhof (1991), we investigate here how some of the principles underlying these approaches can be extended to the study of human dialogue, taking over some hypotheses of Asher and Lascarides (1998, 2003). In this perspective, a dialogue is made of segment...

The process of retrieving conversations from social network sites differs from traditional Web information retrieval because it involves human communication aspects, like the degree of interest in the conversation explicitly or implicitly expressed by the interacting people and their influence/popularity. Our demo allows users to include these aspects into the search process. The system allows ...