In conversation, when speech is followed by a backchannel, evidence of continued engagement by one’s dialogue partner, that speech displays a combination of cues that appear to signal to one’s interlocutor that a backchannel is appropriate. We term these cues backchannel-preceding cues (BPC)s, and examine the Columbia Games Corpus for evidence of entrainment on such cues. Entrainment, the pheno...

This study sought to test Robinson’s (1995, 2003b) cognition hypothesis by investigating the effects of cognitive task difficulty on ESL learners’ written and oral task performance. 1 Ten exchange students at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa were given four sets of picture-based narrative tasks: a simple writing task, a difficult writing task, a simple speaking task, and a difficult speaking ...

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) are poised to constitute a specific category within persuasive systems, in particular through their ability to support affective dialogue. One possible approach consists in using ECA as virtual coaches or personal assistants and to make persuasion part of a dialogue game implementing specific argumentation or negotiation features. In this paper, we explore a...

Task-based language Teaching (TBLT) has occupied the pertinent literature for some long years. However, the role of specific task type in developing specific skill type seems to be amongst the intact issues in the literature. To shed more light on this issue, the present study was conducted to compare the effect of jigsaw and decision-making tasks on improving listening and speaking abilities o...

To be understood, non-native speakers must adapt their speech in order to produce contrasts in their second language (L2) that are not present in their first language (L1). Here we examine mechanisms hypothesized to facilitate such adaptation within spoken dialogue: priming, affiliation, and audience design. In two experiments, Korean non-native speakers of English interacted in a referential c...

Natural language generation systems to date have concentrated on the tasks of explanation generation, tutorial dialogue, automated software documentation, and similar technical tasks. A largely unexplored area is narrative prose generation, or the production of texts used in stories such as novels, mysteries, and fairy tales. We present a feature analysis of one complex area of NLG found in nar...

Task difficulty across different macro-genres continues to remain among less attended areas in second language development studies. This study examined the correlation between task difficulty across the descriptive, narrative, argumentative, and expository macro-genres. The three components of task difficulty (i.e., code complexity, cognitive complexity, and communicative stress) were also comp...

This paper explores the use of lips movements for the purpose of speaker and voice activity detection, a task that is essential in multi-modal multiparty human machine dialogue. The task aims at detecting who and when someone is speaking out of a set of persons. A multiparty dialogue consisting of 4 speakers is audiovisually recorded and then annotated for speaker and speech/silence segments. L...