Being able to comprehend communicative intentions and to recognize whether such intentions are directed toward us or not is extremely important in social interaction. Two brain systems, the mentalizing and the mirror neuron system, have been proposed to underlie intention recognition. However, little is still known about how the systems cooperate within the process of communicative intention un...

We present a definiteness annotation scheme that captures the semantic, pragmatic, and discourse information associated with noun phrases, which we call communicative functions. A survey of the linguistics literature suggests that definiteness does not express a single communicative function but is a grammaticalization of many such functions, for example, identifiability, familiarity, uniquenes...

This paper highlights the folk perception of impoliteness among Ghanaians in view of Watts’ (2003) notion of first order impoliteness. The study showed that impoliteness is not just an opposite of politeness, but the manifestation of non-cooperation, disapproval, and mutual antipathy through certain communicative behaviours that signal disrespect. These communicative behaviours include ‘interru...

UNLABELLED The aim of the present study was to evaluate the pragmatic abilities of patients with schizophrenia in a variety of pragmatic phenomena expressed through different communicative means (language, gestures, and paralinguistic modality). For this purpose we used the Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCo; Sacco et al., 2008). The ABaCo is a validated clinical tool for assessing prag...

Training L2 learners’ pronunciation by using a controlled perception procedure has long been the mainstream of L2 speech pedagogy research. However, endeavors have also been done to explore more communicative teaching methods. The current study presents a paradigm that tests both communicative teaching methods’ renderings of pronunciation pedagogy and a form-focused instruction which is less us...

Systems based on distributed agent architectures require an agent communications language having a clearly defined semantics. This paper demonstrates that a semantics for an agent communications language can be founded on the premise that agents are building, maintaining, and disbanding teams through their performance of communicative acts. This view requires that definitions of basic communica...

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the designer can use and exploit results obtained by applying different methods and techniques of cognitive ergonomics. In particular, this study made use of the Eye-tracking tool and other qualitative projective techniques in order to assess the user perception based on different attributes in different contests (from packaging to jewelry, car seats a...

To confirm the language independency of a communicative prosody generation from input word impression vector, we synthesized communicative Mandarin speech using prosodic characteristics of communicative Japanese speech. The fundamental frequency and duration characteristics of oneword “n” utterances of Japanese were copied to Mandarin through input word attributes. From the subjective impressio...