Humans gesture even when their gestures can serve no communicative function (e.g., when the listener cannot see them). This study explores the intrapersonal function of gestures, and the semantic content of the speech they accompany. Sixty-eight adults participated in pairs, communicating on an object description task. Visibility of partner was manipulated; participants completed half the task ...

The aim of this study was to verify the moment with more reliable data to survey children's pragmatic profile. Participants were five children with typical language development and ages between 7 years and 1 month and 8 years and 11 months. Data collection involved a 150-minute recording of a child-researcher interaction, divided into five 30-minute individual sessions. Data were later analyzed...

BACKGROUND Angelman Syndrome (AS) is a rare neurodevelopment disorder resulting from deficient expression or function of the maternally inherited allele of UBE3A gene. The aim of the study is to attempt at providing a detailed definition of neurodevelopmental profile in AS, with particular regard to motor, cognitive, communicative, behavioural and neurovisual, features by using standardized ins...

Mother-infant interactions during feeding and play are pivotal experiences in the development of infants' early social abilities (Stern, 1985, 1995; Biringen, 2000). Stern indicated distinctive characteristics of mother-infant interactions, respectively, during feeding and play, suggesting to evaluate both to better describe the complexity of such early affective and social experiences (Stern, ...

Seductive interaction is here analyzed as a flexible plurality of behavioral patterns, corresponding to the variety of communicative intentions: exhibition, approaching the partner, deepening reciprocal knowledge, and reaching of a level of intimacy. The attention is moved from a structural analysis in which seduction is described as a timed flow of interactions characterized by different “step...

Non-human primates use various communicative means in interactions with others. While primate gestures are commonly considered to be intentionally and flexibly used signals, facial expressions are often referred to as inflexible, automatic expressions of affective internal states. To explore whether and how non-human primates use facial expressions in specific communicative interactions, we stu...

There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither). Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resid...

When conveying information about spatial situations and goals, speakers adapt flexibly to their addressee. Our aim is to equip our dialogue system with the communicative abilities required for such a natural, adaptive dialogue. In this paper we investigate how humans react to other humans and to a dialogue system when giving route descriptions with a map. We focus on two aspects of spatial lang...

The notion of phonetic convergence covers all adaptations in articulatory and acoustic features towards those of a communicative partner, or in other terms an increase in segmental and suprasegmental similarity between them (Pardo 2006). Up until now most of the experiments on convergence were designed for monolingual dyads, with very few investigations of convergence in native-nonnative intera...