This paper investigates the social-cognitive and motivational complexities underlying prelinguistic infants’ gestural communication. With regard to deictic referential gestures, new and recent experimental evidence shows that infant pointing is a complex communicative act based on social-cognitive skills and cooperative motives. With regard to infant representational gestures, findings suggest ...

A referential communication task conducted with five pairs of native speakers of Yucatec Maya produced evidence of “referential promiscuity” in the selection among spatial frames of reference (FoRs): speakers switched freely between FoRs and pervasively combined multiple types in single descriptions. In contrast, a recall memory experiment conducted with 18 speakers revealed a strong bias towar...

Two experiments were conducted to assess the referential function of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) gestures to obtain food. The chimpanzees received 1 trial per condition. In Experiment 1 (N = 101), in full view of the chimpanzee, a banana was placed on top of 1 of 2 inverted buckets or was hidden underneath 1 of the buckets. In Experiment 2 (N = 35), 4 conditions were presented in constant orde...

The evolutionary origins of the use of speech signals to refer to events or objects in the world have remained obscure. Although functionally referential calls have been described in some monkey species, studies with our closest living relatives, the great apes, have not generated comparable findings. These negative results have been taken to suggest that ape vocalizations are not the product o...

Inspired by previous work on emergent communication in referential games, we propose a novel multi-modal, multi-step referential game, where the sender and receiver have access to distinct modalities of an object, and their information exchange is bidirectional and of arbitrary duration. The multi-modal multi-step setting allows agents to develop an internal communication significantly closer t...

communication, cognition, language, and speech are interrelated and develop together. it should come as no surprise to us that the key to intervention with deaf children is to establish, as early as possible, a functional communication system for the child and the parents. early intervention programs need to be multidisciplinary, technologically sound and most important, it should take cognizan...

In 2 studies, we investigated how peers establish a referential pact to call something, for example, a cushion versus a pillow (both equally felicitous). In Study 1, pairs of 4- and 6-year-old German-speaking peers established a referential pact for an artifact, for example, a woman's shoe, in a referential communication task. Six-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, continued to use these same expr...

One of most serious problems plaguing the World Wide Web today is that of broken hypertext links, which are a major annoyance to browsing users and also a cause of tarnished reputation and possible loss of opportunity for information providers. The root of the problem lies in the current Web architecture’s lack of support for referential integrity. This paper presents a model for the provision ...