It is believed that the communicative language teaching approach (abbreviated as CLTA) is one of the most effective methods to keep away from the weaknesses of the traditional English teaching method in developing students’ communicative ability. Using games, which is communicative in essence, are often considered effective in developing students’ communicative ability. In order to help English...

In this paper, we introduce M-Trans system, which has an ability of recording the specification of the design process for the communicative process, which is designed in a discussion and is be specified incompletely, of creating the communicative process according to the specification, and of supporting dynamic process specifications utilizing the record of executed communicative process. The s...

In the present study we assessed the forms and functions of prelinguistic communicative behaviors for 120 children and adults with Rett syndrome using the Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts (IPCA) (Sigafoos et al. Communication Disorders Quarterly 21:77-86, 2000a). Informants completed the IPCA and the results were analysed to provide a systematic inventory and objective description of t...

In the philosophical theory of communicative action, rationality refers to interpersonal communication rather than to a knowing subject. Thus, a social view of rationality is suggested. The theory differentiates between two kinds of rationality, the emancipative communicative and the strategic or instrumental reasoning. Using experimental designs in an fMRI setting, recent studies explored simi...

BACKGROUND Constructivist approaches to learning focus on learning environments in which students have the opportunity to construct knowledge themselves, and negotiate this knowledge with others. Discovery learning and collaborative learning are examples of learning contexts that cater for knowledge construction processes. We introduce a computer-based learning environment in which the two form...

This paper is about learning Belief Networks (BNs) for spoken language understanding. The BNs are used to infer the communicative goal of a user's information-seeking query in a restricted domain. We assume that a restricted domain generally has a finite number of communicative goals. The problem is formulated as N binary classifications (one per goal), and each is performed by a BN. This formu...

Recent work suggests that variation in online language production reflects the fact that speech is information-theoretically efficient for communication. We apply this idea to studying the offline, structural properties of language, asking whether lexical properties may similarly reflect communicative pressures. We present evidence for the Communicative Lexicon Hypothesis (CLH): human lexical s...

We study the problem of checking the competence of communicative agents operating in a global society in order to receive and offer electronic services. Such a society will be composed of local subsocieties that will often be semi-open, viz., entrance of agents in a semiopen society is conditional to specific admission criteria. Assuming that a candidate agent provides an abstract description o...

Interaction means to share a communicative space with others. Social interactions are reciprocally-oriented activities among currently present partners. An artificial system can be such a partner for humans. In this study, we investigate the effect of disturbance in humanrobot interaction. Disturbance in communication is an attention shift of a partner caused by an external factor. In human-hum...

Human children 18-24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees were uninterested in the social games. As an experimental manipulation, in each task the adult partner stopped participating at a specific poi...