Virtual human, with realistic behaviors and social skills, evoke in users a range of social behaviors normally only seen in human face-to-face interactions. One of the key challenges in creating such virtual humans is to give them human-like conversational skills, such as turn-taking skill. In this paper, we propose a multimodal end-of-turn prediction model. Instead of recording face-to-face co...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to explore the skills and strategies employed by professionals when having difficult conversations to provide information to loved ones as part of palliative care. METHOD A qualitative design was chosen with in-depth interviews with nurses, assistant nurses and doctors a Hospital in Sweden and were analysed using content analysis. RESULTS The interviews pr...

The progressive neuropathology involved in dementia frequently causes a gradual decline in communication skills. Communication partners who are unaware of the specific communication problems faced by people with dementia (PWD) can inadvertently challenge their conversation partner, leading to distress and a reduced flow of information between speakers. Previous research has produced an extensiv...

In a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. They negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. Their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. Thus, not only does social life depend...

OBJECTIVE This review synthesizes communication interventions that involved the use of speech generating devices (SGD) for individuals with developmental disabilities. METHODS Systematic searches of electronic databases, journals and reference lists identified 35 studies meeting the inclusion criteria. These studies were evaluated in terms of (a) participants, (b) SGD function, (c) SGD charac...

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, temporal/aspectual markers and narrative components we...

in a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. they negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. thus, not only does social life depend...

We argue for the importance of negotiation as a challenge problem for virtual human research, and introduce a virtual conversational agent that allows people to practice a wide range of negotiation skills. We describe the multi-issue bargaining task, which has become a de facto standard for teaching and research on negotiation in both the social and computer sciences. This task is popular as it...

Virtual human (VH) experiences are increasingly used for training interpersonal skills such as military leadership, classroom education, and doctor-patient interviews. These diverse applications of conversational VHs have a common and unexplored thread – a significant additional population would be afforded interpersonal skills training if VHs were available to simulate either interaction partn...