The objective of this study is to evaluate language outcome in pre-term children, considering multiple factors. The hypothesis is that early communicative capacity (pre-verbal communicative utterances) is affected mainly by biological (prematurity, birth weight, and gender) and social factors (maternal education), while more advanced linguistic abilities (i.e., combinatorial and syntactic abili...

Theoretical rationality and practical rationality are, respectively, properties of an individual's belief system and decision system. While reasoning about instrumental actions complies with practical rationality, understanding communicative actions complies with the principle of relevance. Section 2 reviews the evidence showing that young infants can reason about an agent's instrumental action...

AIM To argue that creating communicative spaces in an action research study gave voice to young mothers who may otherwise have remained voiceless. BACKGROUND Underpinning the concept of the communicative space in action research is the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas, in particular, his theory of communicative action and the ideal speech situation. The author argues that in collabor...

Academic writing, including in English as an Academic Lingua Franca, has become a central feature for the majority of European university students. Despite a large body of research, we find that conceptualisations of student writing still tend to assume a direct link to expert academic genres, which are often explicitly evoked as models. Within a genre analytic paradigm, however, the importance...

This paper describes the DAMSL annotation scheme for communicative acts in dialog The scheme has three layers Forward Communicative Functions Backward Communicative Functions and Utterance Features Each layer allows multiple communicative functions of an utterance to be labeled The Forward Communicative Functions consist of a taxonomy in a similar style as the actions of traditional speech act ...

Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the "mirror neurons system"). However, this view does not explain how these conventions could develop in the first place. Here we target the neglected but crucial issue of how people organize their non-verbal behavior to commu...

The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and communicative to artificial. Saccadic reaction times (SRTs...

The investigation of the ability to perceive, recognize, and judge upon social intentions, such as communicative intentions, on the basis of body motion is a growing research area. Cross-cultural differences in ability to perceive and interpret biological motion, however, have been poorly investigated so far. Progress in this domain strongly depends on the availability of suitable stimulus mate...