The creation of conversational agents capable of expressive and communicative behaviors requires to define the relationship between the agent’s communicative intentions and how these intentions are expressed in a coordinated verbal and nonverbal message. Suppose an agent S (a Sender) has the goal of communicating something to an interlocutor A (Addressee) in a particular situation and context; ...

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a severe neurological disorder characterized by a developmental regression in motor and speech-language domains. There is, however, limited research on socio-communicative development of affected children before the onset of regression. We analyzed audio-video recordings made by parents of six 9- to 12-month old girls later diagnosed with typical RTT, applying the Invento...

This work is aimed at suggesting methodological foundations for following Nursing student's progress in communicative competence. Using qualitative methodology and theoretical reference of interpersonal communication, the research was developed through interviews with 13 professors with experience both in teaching activities and communication research in Nursing. Interviewees reported that they...

We study the problem of generating an English sentence given an underlying probabilistic grammar, a world and a communicative goal. We model the generation problem as a Markov decision process with a suitably defined reward function that reflects the communicative goal. We then use probabilistic planning to solve the MDP and generate a sentence that, with high probability, accomplishes the comm...

Speech conveys communicative meanings by encoding functional contrasts. The contrasts are realized through articulation, a biomechanical process with specific constraints. Phonology, phonetics or any other theories of speech therefore cannot be autonomous from either communicative functions or biophysical mechanisms. Successful speech modeling can be achieved only if communicative functions and...

Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) often show communicative-pragmatic deficits involving different expressive modalities, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic. Most previous research has evaluated pragmatic ability using linguistic tasks only, while the extralinguistic aspects of communication have received less attention. The aim of the present study was to provide a mu...

This paper addresses three topics on functionality that should be incorporated into planning formalisms so that they can: (1) respect limitations of the recipient's working memory; (2) rely on the recipient's inferences to achieve communicative goals; and (3) deliberately violate normally-respected conversational rules to achieve a communicative e ect. The argument is that a planner for communi...

The present study investigated whether young children are better at representing others’ false beliefs in communicative situations than in standard false belief tasks. Younger (3.7–4.6 year-olds, n = 18), middle-aged (4.7–5.6 year-olds, n = 20), and older children (5.7–6.6 year-olds, n = 20) completed both standard false belief and communicative tasks having the same story structure. Although t...

This article discusses a range of current issues and future research possibilities in Communicative Language Testing (CLT) using, as its departure point, the key questions which emerged during the CLT symposium at the 2010 Language Testing Forum (LTF). The paper begins with a summary of the 2010 symposium discussion in which three main issues related to CLT are identified: (1) the “mainstreamin...

The linguistic-communicative paradigm offers some interesting perspectives in a context where the perception of patient needs is considered a critical step in high-quality care. This study describes healthcare organizations as linguistic communities based on the conceptual framework of Habermas' communicative action theory. Four communicative models are present in healthcare settings: objectify...