Communication is an essential skill for cooperative tasks, yet neuroevolved agents struggle to develop communicative behaviour. In fact, it has been shown that communicating agents are sometimes outperformed by noncommunicating ones on tasks that ostensibly require communication. In our paper, we explore mechanisms which could aid agents in developing communication through evolution. Specifical...

In this paper we describe Lokutor, a virtual human. Lokutor is a partially autonomous agent, living a 3D virtual environment. The agent can be controlled via natural language directives of the user (spoken or typed in) and by direct manipulation using a gra cal user interface. Its control system consists of a behavior-based reactive layer, a deliberative control layer and an motivational subsys...

A learning environment for the training of communicative competence has to consider the complexity of human experience, since it requires a number of cues that are managed hic et nunc in the flow of communicative exchange. Therefore, communicative competence has been traditionally considered as a typical face-to-face learning topic. So far, few opportunities exist to learn by experience in an e...

Communicative competence is one of the most highly sought after skills of prospective graduates among employers. In spite of its importance, the notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in Communication and Engineering studies. This fuzziness has undoubtedly led to tensions among stakeholders like educators and professional engineers across disciplinary tenures in interpreting t...

Communicative pointing is a human specific gesture which allows sharing information about a visual item with another person. It sets up a three-way relationship between a subject who points, an addressee and an object. Yet psychophysical and neuroimaging studies have focused on non-communicative pointing, which implies a two-way relationship between a subject and an object without the involveme...

this study investigated the effect of oral dialogue journals on communicative competence of iranian efl learners. participants of this study were 80 students of two payam-e-noor universities who were proved to be homogenous in the communicative competence based on tse (test of spoken english) interview. the participants of one of these universities were considered as the experimental group. the...

Nonverbal vocalizations in dementia are important clinically since they generally have been regarded as disruptive behavior that is disturbing. The aim of the present study is to describe the interactional pattern, including the prosodic package, of nonverbal vocalizations in a participant in a late stage of dementia. The acoustic analysis shows that the vocalizations do not differ significantl...

In addition to its communicative functions, language has been argued to have a variety of extracommunicative functions, as assessed by its causal involvement in putatively nonlinguistic tasks. In the present work, I argue that language may be critically involved in the ability of human adults to categorize objects on a specific dimension (e.g., color) while abstracting over other dimensions (e....