The study focuses on the methodological views of Zygmunt Ziembiński, against background axiological issues addressed in his scientific investigations. In this respect, author distinguishes three development periods Ziembiński’s work; first was dominated by a psychologist and empiricist approach to axiology, whereas onset second marked semiotic-pragmatic turn. both periods, essence properties ev...

We address the challenging task of processing partial multimodal utterances in a mixed-initiative dialogue system for multiple applications such as information seeking, device control etc. Based on four different types of expectations computed by our action planner (aka dialog manager), we distinguish between expected utterances, various degrees of unexpected but plausible utterances, and unint...

To generate spontaneous utterances, it is important to omit some items from them appropriately. Previously, generation of elliptical utterances is discussed only from a view of whether an item in question is known or unknown in the context of dialogue. We point out that some items that are already known should not be omitted in some situation. For example, omitting too many items from utterance...

The fundamental frequencies (F0) of daily life utterances of Japanese infants and their parents from the infant's birth until about 5 years of age were longitudinally analyzed. The analysis revealed that an infant's F0 mean decreases as a function of month of age. It also showed that within- and between-utterance variability in infant F0 is different before and after the onset of two-word utter...

Most theories of pragmatics and language processing predict that speakers avoid informationally redundant utterances. From a processing standpoint, it remains unclear what happens when listeners encounter such utterances, and how they interpret them. We argue that uninformative utterances can trigger pragmatic inferences, which increase utterance utility in line with listener expectations. In t...

We investigate whether automatic accent identification is more effective for English utterances embedded in a different language as part of a mixed code than for English utterances that are part of a monolingual dialogue. Our focus is on Xhosa and Zulu, two South African languages for which code mixing with English is very common. In order to carry out our investigation, we extract English utte...

Fifty-one children with language delays, and their mothers, were studied to identify characteristics of the children’s utterances that potentially influence an aspect of maternal linguistic input: expansions. A subset of 33 of these dyads was studied and submitted to sequential analysis to identify the types of child utterances mothers were most likely to expand. Twenty-minute mother-child free...