We examined the effects of group communication treatment on linguistic and communicative performance in adults with chronic aphasia. Participants were randomly assigned to two treatment and two deferred treatment groups. Groups were balanced for age, education level, and initial aphasia severity. Twenty-four participants completed the 4-month treatment trial. While in the treatment condition, a...

The ability to design tailored messages for specific listeners is an important aspect of human communication. The present study investigates whether a mere belief about an addressee's identity influences the generation and production of a communicative message in a novel, non-verbal communication task. Participants were made to believe they were playing a game with a child or an adult partner, ...

Embodied conversational agents (ECA) should exhibit nonverbal behaviors that are meaningfully related to their speech and mental state. This paper describes Cerebella, a system that automatically derives communicative functions from the text and audio of an utterance by combining lexical, acoustic, syntactic, semantic and rhetorical analyses. Communicative functions are then mapped to a multimo...

OBJECTIVE Verbal communicative competence is the main objective after early cochlear implantation in deaf children. However, there are currently no validated instruments to assess a child's real-world communicative abilities. We adopted a rigorous methodological approach to systematically develop the Functioning after Pediatric Cochlear Implantation instrument (FAPCI), a family-centered communi...

PURPOSE To investigate the social-cognitive performance of children with diagnostics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), mental disability (MD) and hearing impairment (HI) in two different communicative situations. METHODS Participated in this study 30 children ages between 3 and 12 years starting speech language therapy processes, divided in three groups: Group 1 - ten children with diagnoses...

Humans usually point at objects to communicate with other persons, although they generally avoid pointing at the other's body. Moreover, patients with heterotopagnosia after left parietal damage cannot point at another person's body parts, although they can point at objects and at their own body parts and although they can grasp the others' body parts. Strikingly, their performance gradually im...