BACKGROUND In the context of interacting activities requiring close-body contact such as fighting or dancing, the actions of one agent can be used to predict the actions of the second agent. In the present study, we investigated whether interpersonal predictive coding extends to interactive activities--such as communicative interactions--in which no physical contingency is implied between the m...

BACKGROUND Communication of autistic children. AIM To assess the communication functionality of verbal and non-verbal children of the autistic spectrum and to identify possible associations amongst the groups. METHOD Subjects were 20 children of the autistic spectrum divided into two groups: V with 10 verbal children and NV with 10 non-verbal children with ages varying between 2y10m and 10y...

The creation of conversational agents capable of expressive and communicative behaviors requires to define the relationship between the agent’s communicative intentions and how these intentions are expressed in a coordinated verbal and nonverbal message. Suppose an agent S (a Sender) has the goal of communicating something to an interlocutor A (Addressee) in a particular situation and context; ...

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a severe neurological disorder characterized by a developmental regression in motor and speech-language domains. There is, however, limited research on socio-communicative development of affected children before the onset of regression. We analyzed audio-video recordings made by parents of six 9- to 12-month old girls later diagnosed with typical RTT, applying the Invento...

This work is aimed at suggesting methodological foundations for following Nursing student's progress in communicative competence. Using qualitative methodology and theoretical reference of interpersonal communication, the research was developed through interviews with 13 professors with experience both in teaching activities and communication research in Nursing. Interviewees reported that they...

We study the problem of generating an English sentence given an underlying probabilistic grammar, a world and a communicative goal. We model the generation problem as a Markov decision process with a suitably defined reward function that reflects the communicative goal. We then use probabilistic planning to solve the MDP and generate a sentence that, with high probability, accomplishes the comm...

Speech conveys communicative meanings by encoding functional contrasts. The contrasts are realized through articulation, a biomechanical process with specific constraints. Phonology, phonetics or any other theories of speech therefore cannot be autonomous from either communicative functions or biophysical mechanisms. Successful speech modeling can be achieved only if communicative functions and...

Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) often show communicative-pragmatic deficits involving different expressive modalities, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic. Most previous research has evaluated pragmatic ability using linguistic tasks only, while the extralinguistic aspects of communication have received less attention. The aim of the present study was to provide a mu...

This paper addresses three topics on functionality that should be incorporated into planning formalisms so that they can: (1) respect limitations of the recipient's working memory; (2) rely on the recipient's inferences to achieve communicative goals; and (3) deliberately violate normally-respected conversational rules to achieve a communicative e ect. The argument is that a planner for communi...