In order to understand how Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) can be endowed with the emotional skills to provide social support to users, we developed Robin, an empathic virtual buddy for victims of cyberbullying.

The activity of speaking is conducted spontaneously and there is not much time devoted to preplanning and arranging the utterances the speaker intends to deliver. Briefly defined, gambits and routines refer to the words and phrases that facilitate the flow of conversations. As such, one way to help learners acquire oral proficiency is to teach gambits that support the social skills emphasized. ...

Conversation-Based Assessment (CBA) represents a relatively new method of measuring student cognitive skills (e.g., science reasoning) through adaptive dialogues with automated characters. This approach leverages the openness of natural language with the interactivity of spoken dialogue to engage students in verbal reasoning and constructive processes (i.e., cognition). These two dimensions dif...

background: auditory rehabilitation isone of the important tasks of speech-language pathologists. so, it is necessary to know auditory behaviors in order to make some decisions about the children with hearing loss such as determining the effectiveness of the current rehabilitation programs and/or devices. the auditory behavior in everyday life (abel) questionnaire is a valid and reliable assess...

In this paper, we describe RavenClaw, a plan-based, task-independent dialog management framework. RavenClaw isolates the domain-specific aspects of the dialog control logic from domain-independent conversational skills, and in the process facilitates rapid development of mixed-initiative systems operating in complex, task-oriented domains. System developers can focus exclusively on describing t...

Children's early language exposure impacts their later linguistic skills, cognitive abilities, and academic achievement, and large disparities in language exposure are associated with family socioeconomic status (SES). However, there is little evidence about the neural mechanisms underlying the relation between language experience and linguistic and cognitive development. Here, language experie...

PURPOSE The present study examined the extent of genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in children's conversational language use. METHOD Behavioral genetic analyses focused on conversational measures and 2 standardized tests from 380 twins (M = 7.13 years) during the 2nd year of the Western Reserve Reading Project (S. A. Petrill, K. Deater-Deckard, L. A. Thompson, L. ...

Different turn-taking strategies of an agent influence the impression that people have of it. We recorded conversations of a human with an interviewing agent, controlled by a wizard and using a particular turn-taking strategy. A questionnaire with 27 semantic differential scales concerning personality, emotion, social skills and interviewing skills was used to capture these impressions. We show...