The outsourced software development process has traditionally relied on a requirements-driven black-box approach for transferring knowledge of customer needs to vendors. When this approach is feasible, the need for the customer and the vendor to deeply understand each others’ knowledge domain is limited. We describe this as symmetric division of knowledge. However, asymmetric overlaps in knowle...

Trust is important to organizations because it lubricates the relationships that form the interlocking components of coordination, which, like gears, turn the wheels of commerce. Trust becomes especially important during an organizational crisis (Mishra, 1996) or when supportive structures are inadequate. Thus it is vital to examine how trust forms in various work and commercial settings, becau...

The relationship between focus and new information has been unclear despite being the subject of several information structure studies. Here, we report an eye-tracking experiment that explored the relationship between them in on-line discourse processing in Chinese reading. Focus was marked by the Chinese focus-particle "shi", which is equivalent to the cleft structure "it was... who..." in Eng...

Revealing the relations between pitch accent types and the informational status of words requires a refined discourse analysis of spontaneous speech. A cooperative unscripted task in which subjects gave instructions for decorating Christmas trees successfully induced production of target adjective-noun pairs conveying new/given and contrastive information. Adapting Grosz and Sidner’s intention-...

Adopting an eyetracking paradigm, we investigated the role of H*L, L*HL, L*H, H*LH, and deaccentuation at the intonational phrase-final position in online processing of information status in British English in natural speech. The role of H*L, L*H and deaccentuation was also examined in diphonesynthetic speech. It was found that H*L and L*HL create a strong bias towards newness, whereas L*H, lik...