objective: discourse disorders of elderly people with alzheimer’s disease affect their ability to communicate and participate in social interaction. this research compares descriptive discourse among elderlies with alzheimer’s disease and healthy elderlies.methods: the method applied in the present study is ex post facto. patients with alzheimer’s disease and the healthy elderlies of tehran mad...

Functional brain imaging provides key information to characterize neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Specifically, the metabolic activity measured through fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) and the connectivity extracted from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are promising biomarkers that can be used for early assessmen...

In this review article, empirical studies published from 2004 through 2014 on second-language (L2) oral proficiency testing are analyzed, with a specific focus on discourse and social interaction in such tests. Taking three common test setups, oral proficiency interviews (OPIs), paired peer tests, and group peer tests as an organizing principle for the studies examined, recent developments in L...

Comparing to graphical user interfaces, speech-only interfaces face several problems: robustness, making clear what functionality is available, and making clear how the functionality may be accessed. We explore a potential solution for these problems by presenting a visual representation of the domain of discourse and of the state of the dialogue. We describe an experiment in which uni-modal an...

The Knowledge Management (KM) literature is reviewed with a focus on theory, finding a core issue in the lack of a widely accepted and understood definition of knowledge. Theories are categorised on the bisecting continua of personal vs. organizational knowledge, and reified knowledge vs. knowledge as social action. It is argued that a fresh approach based on the Discourse Psychology framework,...

In this paper, we propose a partial framework for annotating conversation with discourse and interaction information. We focus discourse coherence, reported speech and humor that are not included in most of existing dialogue annotation frameworks. These phenomena are ubiquitous in our conversational but their analysis seems necessary for all kind of communicative situations, including task-orie...

Negotiation is an important part of task-oriented expert-consultation dialogues. This paper presents a plan-based model for understanding cooperative negotiation subdialogues. Our system infers both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. Beliefs, and the strength of these beliefs, are recognized from the surface form of utterances,fr...

Theories of CSCL have often focused on the discourse of student groups and their possible modes of participation in this discourse as definitive of collaborative learning. Lave & Wenger (1991), for instance, analyzed the increasing participation of novices in the discourses of communities of practice. Scardamalia & Bereiter (1996) proposed the use of networked computers to promote literate part...

In this paper we present a cognitive model of the acquisition and use of referring expressions in discourse. In certain discourse contexts, children produce unrecoverable pronouns where a full NP would have been the adult choice. Based on computational simulations of our model, we argue that adult-like use of referring subjects requires (a) sufficient working memory capacity to identify the dis...

It has been argued that the use of inverse voice in languages with pragmatic inversion depends on the discourse status of the referents: this voice occurs when the patient outranks the agent in topicality. In our article, we present empirical evidence from Teribe, a Chibchan language of Panama and Costa Rica and we examine the interaction between inverse voice and information structure. We repo...