Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) (Study 1) and 18- and 24-month-old human children (Study 2) participated in a novel communicative task. A human experimenter (E) hid food or a toy in one of two opaque containers before gesturing towards the reward's location in one of two ways. In the Informing condition, she attempted to help the subject find the hidden object by simply...

The notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in communication studies. This fuzziness has led to tensions among engineers across tenures in interpreting what constitutes communicative competence. The study seeks to investigate novice and professional engineers’ understanding of the said notion in terms of two main elements of communicative competence: linguistic and rhetorical c...

In naturally occurring discourse, much that is meant to be communicated is left out of the explicit text. The interpreter must reconstruct much of the intended meaning ; and the generator can leave out information that will be reconstructed. In this paper, we use an abductive approach to generation and interpretation to provide an account of how the generative and interpretive processes can be ...

In an attempt to find out which of the two Swedish prosodic contrasts of 1) word stress pattern and 2) tonal word accent category has the greatest communicative weight, a lexical decision experiment was conducted: in one part word stress pattern was changed from trochaic to iambic, and in the other part trochaic accent II words were changed to accent I. Native Swedish listeners were asked to de...

BACKGROUND Beyond providing cues about an agent's intention, communicative actions convey information about the presence of a second agent towards whom the action is directed (second-agent information). In two psychophysical studies we investigated whether the perceptual system makes use of this information to infer the presence of a second agent when dealing with impoverished and/or noisy sens...

This paper introduces the theory of communicative competence by Hymes, the interpretation of communicative competence by Canale & Swain, the elements of efficient communication by Widdowson respectively, and the limitation of the previous application in China with the teaching environment of Classroom plus blackboard, analyzes the necessity and feasibility of creating authentic communicative en...

In this paper I describe ongoing research that seeks to provide a common framework for the generation and interpretation of spontaneous gesture in the context of speech. I present a testbed for this framework in the form of a program that generates speech, gesture, and facial expression from underlying rules specifying (a) what speech and gesture are generated on the basis of a given communicat...

The attitude one has towards language learning determines the success or failure of learning the language. To this effect, this study aimed to explore EFL learners’ attitudes towards communicative language learning and the relationship between learners’ attitudes and English language achievement. To address these objectives, the study adopted a survey research design. Two hundred seventeen grad...

The attitude one has towards language learning determines the success or failure of learning the language. To this effect, this study aimed to explore EFL learners’ attitudes towards communicative language learning and the relationship between learners’ attitudes and English language achievement. To address these objectives, the study adopted a survey research design. Two hundred seventeen grad...