In an ERP study we investigate the time course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic role of a noun and the contextually provided ad-hoc affordance induced by a linguistic discourse. If preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb inconsistent with the telic role in a sentence elicits an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb. However, if the preceding discourse contex...

This paper investigates the structure of Mandarin spoken dialogues by analysing the distribution of words and turns used in dialogues. The results of an empirical quantitative study show that independent of speakers, there exists a kind of basic vocabulary for daily Mandarin conversations. It is proposed that this is the minimal set of a lexicon for the use of spoken Mandarin. Moreover, a numbe...

The present ERP study investigated the on-line interaction of prosody and information structure in Dutch. More specifically, we looked into how pitch accents, which are either congruous or incongruous with respect to the discourse context, are processed. Our results show that listeners process prosodic information immediately and check it for congruity within the discourse. Inappropriate prosod...

Analytical frameworks for examining educational computer mediated discourse have been mainly designed for asynchronous discussions; hence the classification schemes are typically more sensitive when applied to longer postings than the shorter, more condensed exchanges present in online synchronous discourse. This chapter introduces the exchange structure analysis framework for examining online ...

Word pairs, which are one of the most easily accessible features between two text segments, have been proven to be very useful for detecting the discourse relations held between text segments. However, because of the data sparsity problem, the performance achieved by using word pair features is limited. In this paper, in order to overcome the data sparsity problem, we propose the use of word em...

In this paper, we describe a gesture expressivity analysis of a character in a conversational interaction. To determine gesture properties that attract and maintain perceptual attention, we study if there exists some effects in the field of gesture expressivity modulations. We study this role at a low level (gesture phase) and at a higher level (discourse structure) based on a corpus annotation...

In this paper we propose a cognitive model that simulates the acquisition of object pronouns. The model will be implemented to generate precise and testable predictions about the comprehension and production of object pronouns. During sentence processing, the model incrementally builds a structural representation of the sentence, and the model incrementally constructs a discourse representation...

In this paper, we investigate whether a dataset derived from a multi-purpose corpus such as the Spoken Dutch Corpus may be considered appropriate for developing a taxonomy of wh-questions, and a model of the way in which these questions are integrated in spoken discourse. We compare the results obtained from the Spoken Dutch Corpus with a similar analysis of a large random collection of FAQs fr...

Therapeutic discourse is the talk-in-interaction that represents the social practice between clinician and client. This article invites speech-language pathologists to apply their knowledge of language to analyzing therapy talk and to learn how talking practices shape clinical roles and identities. A range of qualitative research approaches, including ethnography of communication, conversation ...

Usually, human-computer dialogue systems rely on ad-hoc solutions for the component performing speech turn generation, in natural language. However, integration of taskspecific and general world knowledge in order to provide a more reliable and natural interaction with humans also through more sophisticated language generation techniques becomes needed. In this paper we present performance impr...