This article describes a program based on behavioral principles to develop verbal behavior in severely handicapped young children and designed to be conducted by college students. The results indicate that college students are able to apply their technical skills, obtained mainly from an increasing number of beha11iorally oriented courses offered at the undergraduate level, and make important c...

In this paper we introduce a system that automatically adds different types of non-verbal behavior to a given dialogue script between two virtual embodied agents. It allows us to transform a dialogue in text format into an agent behavior script enriched by eye gaze and conversational gesture behavior. The agents’ gaze behavior is informed by theories of human face-to-face gaze behavior. Gesture...

As the second in a series of studies concerning the development of kindergartners’ self-perceptions, this study examined the effects of the kindergarten experience on self-perceptions of African American and White students as they progressed through their kindergarten year. Using a countywide sample of 209 children in 31 classrooms, the study incorporated in vivo observations of teachers’ verba...

Behavior categories for observations of 304 mentally disabled adults were analyzed in relation to settings (sheltered workshops and residential facility), personal characteristics (age, sex, IQ, diagnosis, and desire for affiliation) and characteristics of partners. Both settings and personal characteristics predicted individual behavior rates for the 10 most frequently observed behavior catego...

The conceptual basis for many effective language-training programs are based on Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior. Skinner described several elementary verbal operants including mands, tacts, intraverbals, and echoics. According to Skinner, responses that are the same topography may actually be functionally independent. Previous research has supported Skinner's assertion of functiona...

—The Robadom project aims at creating a homecare robot that help and assist people in their daily life, either in doing task for the human or in managing day organization. A robot could have this kind of role only if it is accepted by humans. Before thinking about the robot appearance, we decided to evaluate the importance of the relation between verbal and nonverbal communication during a huma...

Interpersonal stances are expressed by non-verbal behaviors on a variety of different modalities. The perception of these behaviors is influenced by the context of the interaction, how they are sequenced with other behaviors from the same person and behaviors from other interactants. In this paper, we introduce a framework considering the expressions of stances on different layers during an int...

Extant research suggests that people seem deceitful and difficult to understand when their verbal behavior is inconsistent with their nonverbal behavior. Building on this literature, we examined the impact of behavioral coherence on impression formation: We expected people to be likeable to the extent that their verbal and nonverbal behavior was consistent (i.e., coherent). In two studies, part...

OBJECTIVE The present study was performed to examine the effects of two speech therapy methods on six verbal behaviors of autistic children, including oral speech, listening, organizing, speaking, semantics, and syntax. MATERIALS & METHODS IN THIS STUDY, THIRTY CHILDREN WITH AUTISM WERE ASSIGNED TO ONE OF TWO GROUPS: imitative and cognitive groups. Before starting the main procedures of the s...