To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found...

The purpose of the present article is to present an overview of a set of studies conducted in our own laboratory on cognitive and communicative development in children with cochlear implants (CI). The results demonstrate that children with CIs perform at significantly lower levels on the majority of the cognitive tasks. The exceptions to this trend are tasks with relatively lower demands on pho...

Awareness is defined as the perception of the activities being carried out by members of a team in a given context. The use of awareness support techniques reduces the effort needed to realize communicative and collaborative tasks. Therefore, this leads to an increase in group work productivity. In this article we propose a conceptual framework which improves upon the process of building intera...

This paper describes how a virtual agent assists a huam user in collaborative construction tasks by combining manipulative capabilities for assembly actions with conversational capabilities for mixed-initiative dialogue. We present an interaction model for representing the evolving information states of the participants in this interaction. It includes multiple dimensions along which an interac...

In this paper we investigate some questions about coordination and interpretation which have been addressed by bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi–OT). We consider examples from anaphora resolution, and there especially the role of epistemic contexts and expectations. We look at communicative acts as joint projects following H.H. Clark (1996) and model them by using multi–agent systems with joi...

“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” my 3-year-old granddaughter called to me from her car seat. Her out of-the-blue, metacognitive comment confirmed that, despite inconsistent performance on false belief tasks, young children reveal sophisticated mindreading abilities in their spontaneous talk (Shatz, 1994). At the least, she was concerned with knowledge in another’s mind. But her statement sug...

Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers’ communicative intentions (Grice 1989). This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive comp...

In this position paper, we argue Ibr the need for a generation system to represent communicative goals (i.e., goals that express the speaker's intent to aflect the bearer's mental attitudes), at least if certain tasks are to be achieved. We lurther argue that, wlfile rhetorical relations might be recoverable t tom other Iactors, they appear to be a useful level of abstraction to maintain about ...

How do we measure avian ‘intelligence’ and communicative capacities? Two decades of study on Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) provide more questions than answers. What is intelligence? Can we evaluate nonhumans using human tasks and definitions? Or fairly test nonhuman sensory systems? How do nonmammalian brains process information? Do avian and mammalian cognitive capacities significantly ov...

The ETNA project explored the audio and video quality requirements for a range of networked realtime multimedia applications. When the project began, there was little applicable knowledge in the human factors community as to the specific audio-visual requirements that different sorts of communicative tasks might demand. The ETNA project showed that these differ according to specific task and us...