Explanatory and pragmatic trials represent ends of a continuum of attitudes about clinical trial design. Recent literature argues that pragmatic trials are more informative about clinical care in the real world. Although there is place for more pragmatic studies to inform clinical practice and health policy decision-making, we are concerned that it is generally under-appreciated that extrapolat...

veryfew attempts have been made in the past to develop instruments to measure pragmatic knowledge of second language (l2) learners. the absence of such instruments in the literature of english language teaching (elt) underscores the need for the researchers to develop new tests that are specifically designed to assess this crucial but less explored aspect of language learners’ (lls) knowledge. ...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is traditionally associated with motor symptoms. However, impairments in language functioning may also accompany this disorder. The present study investigated pragmatic language deficits in PD and their relationship to cognitive functioning. Forty patients with PD were compared to ageand IQ-matched controls on measures of pragmatic language functioning using the Test of...

We present a model of pragmatic referring expression interpretation in a grounded communication task (identifying colors from descriptions) that draws upon predictions from two recurrent neural network classifiers, a speaker and a listener, unified by a recursive pragmatic reasoning framework. Experiments show that this combined pragmatic model interprets color descriptions more accurately than...

The reductionist/holist debate seems an impoverished one, with many participants appearing to adopt a position first and constructing rationalisations second. Here I propose an intermediate position of pragmatic holism, that irrespective of whether all natural systems are theoretically reducible, for many systems it is completely impractical to attempt such a reduction, also that regardless if ...

BACKGROUND The few studies that have tracked children with developmental language disorder to adulthood have found that these individuals experience considerable difficulties with psychosocial adjustment (for example, academic, vocational and social aptitude). Evidence that some children also develop autistic symptomatology over time has raised suggestions that developmental language disorder m...