In face-to-face conversation, participants often give the floor, or the voice, to nonpresent participants – virtual participants. These are made present in the conversation by actual speakers quoting them, voicing them or referring to their opinions. In this paper, we examine instances of such virtual talk. Data are drawn from focus group discussions and public meetings about genetically modifi...

The assessment of voluntary behavior in non-communicative brain injured patients is often challenging due to the existence of profound motor impairment. In the absence of a full understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness, even a normal activation in response to passive sensory stimulation cannot be considered as proof of the presence of awareness in these patients. In contrast, pre...

Several works IMcKeowu 86, Suthers 88] have emphasized the common aspects of Explanation Production in expert systems and Text Generation. The work described in this paper deals with text generation applied to a particular type of explanations: causal explanations of physical systems. They have akeady motivated influential developments in the field of qualitative reasoning about physical system...

The successful navigation of social interactions depends on a range of cognitive faculties-including the ability to achieve joint attention with others to share information and experiences. We investigated the influence that intention monitoring processes have on gaze-following response times during joint attention. We employed a virtual reality task in which 16 healthy adults engaged in a coll...

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...

The present study investigated the potential role of tasks in engaging Iranian EFL learners in task-supported language learning, affecting on learner-centered instruction and the correspondence between the objectives and contents in current pre-university English course book (Learning to Read English for Pre-University Students). To do this, 100 Iranian EFL teachers of pre-university grade were...