Morpho-syntactic patterns device encompasses a subcategory of the cohesive devices that assists hearers to have an adequate mental representation for understanding speech. This article investigates the morpho-syntactic patterns employed in some Persian live sport radio and TV programs adapting Dooley and Levinsohn’s theoretical and analytical framework. The research data includes around 30,000 ...

Verbal irony is a type of echoic allusion to an attributed utterance or thought (Sperber & Wilson, 1981) that the speaker contrasts with her/his own current thoughts (e.g., saying “You are so brilliant, man!” when he/she actually means “What a clumsy person!”). It has been shown that speakers use a variety of prosodic signals to communicate ironic intentions (see Bryant, 2011). So far, research...

Children with autism and related disabilities frequently fail to develop echoic repertoires. Among the ways in which treatment approaches vary is the extent to which automatic reinforcement is utilized. The present experiment was designed to test the efficacy of a procedure that incorporates automatic reinforcement and socially mediated reinforcement in the development of an echoic repertoire. ...

Echoic responses, which reuse portions of the texts uttered in the preceding turns, abound in dialogues, although semantically they contribute little new information. Earlier, we conducted a corpus-based analysis on echoic responses occurring in real-life dialogues, and examined their informational and dialogue-coordinating functions in connection with their temporal/prosodic features. The pres...

It is unknown whether birds are able to retain the memory of purely sensory auditory information such as white noise over an extended period of time. In a Pavlovian heart rate conditioning paradigm, four pigeons were trained to associate a mild electric shock with periodic random waveforms, and no shock with aperiodic noise. Periodic waveform detection requires echoic memory, i.e., the online r...

Since the days of the multiple-components theory of memory it has become common practice to characterize and/or differentiate memory systems by specifying their lifetime, capacity and susceptibility to interference. Periodic noise was used to study these parameter of echoic memory for random waveforms and to compare them to those of short-term memory. In a first experiment, it was examined up t...

Object recognition, essential to many animals, often occurs underwater and in poor visibility conditions for bottlenose dolphins. Bottlenose dolphins can use sound through their ability to echolocate in order to recognize objects. Echoic object recognition is an unusual faculty that offers rich research opportunities and is the focus of this article. This review begins with a brief overview of ...

Blind source separation (BSS) of audio signals in echoic environments such as an office room is still a very challenging problem. Here we approach the problem from a practical perspective and shed light on how robust a two channel echoic parametric demixing can get. We assume that an oracle (i.e. a perfect estimator) provides a truncated estimate of the mixing FIR filters for a given source con...