BACKGROUND communicative functions used by language therapists and patients. AIM to analyze the communicative functions used by language therapists and patients of the autistic spectrum. METHOD the communicative functions expressed by six therapists in interaction with six patients each were analyzed, constituting 36 profiles of communicative functions expressed by the dyad therapist-patien...

Personal robots and screen agents can be equipped with social abilities to facilitate interaction. This paper describes our research on the influence of these abilities on elderly user’s acceptance of such a system. Experiments were set up in eldercare institutions where a robotic and screen agent with simulated conversational capabilities were used in a Wizard of Oz experiment. Both agents wer...

BACKGROUND Issues concerning language development and their relation with social cognitive aspects give direction to the clinical practice when assisting the population with the diagnosis within the autistic spectrum. The deficits or differences in this development can result in different ways of analyzing and counseling this population. Adolescence becomes a question mark in this analysis sinc...

background: no comprehensive study has been conducted on risk factors of sexual dysfunction in women with diabetes mellitus. objectives: the aim of this study was to consider all possible influencing variables including hormonal, physical and, psychological status, socioeconomic status, and dietary intake to get more accurate and reliable results. patients and methods: sexual function was asses...

BACKGROUND The evolution of altruism has been explained mainly from ultimate perspectives. However, it remains to be investigated from a proximate point of view how and in which situations such social propensity is achieved. We investigated chimpanzees' targeted helping in a tool transfer paradigm, and discuss the similarities and differences in altruism between humans and chimpanzees. Previous...

Human referential communication is often thought as coding-decoding a set of symbols, neglecting that establishing shared meanings requires a computational mechanism powerful enough to mutually negotiate them. Sharing the meaning of a novel symbol might rely on similar conceptual inferences across communicators or on statistical similarities in their sensorimotor behaviors. Using magnetoencepha...

BACKGROUND auditory rehabilitation in deaf children users of sign language. AIM to verify the effects of sound amplification on parent's communicative modalities when interacting with their deaf children. METHOD participants were twelve deaf children, aged 50 to 80 months and their hearing parents. Children had severe or profound hearing loss in their better ear and were fitted with hearing...

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made "language" would contain gesture sentences with con...