on animated pedagogical agents at the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute. Animated pedagogical agents, nicknamed guidebots, interact with learners to help keep learning activities on track. They combine the pedagogical expertise of intelligent tutoring systems with the interpersonal interaction...

Current automated assessment techniques for English language learners evaluate comprehension and synthesis skills via written text or one-turn spoken responses, measuring essential skills needed for academic and professional environments. However, as these current tests do not include dialogue-based components, they cannot provide insight into the conversational competence of the testtaker. Thi...

Outside of Western contexts, natural-conversation-based research on intergenerational communication is relatively rare. To help redress this imbalance, this paper explores the conversational styles of first-encounter talks between five pairs of college students and older adults in Taiwan, and infers the interactional norms that underlie them. It is found that younger Taiwanese adults tend to ex...

Much of the second language acquisition (SLA) scholarship suggests that conversational skills are best acquired through communication in the target language. Although in recent decades communicative approaches to language teaching have seen widespread adoption in the classroom, it remains exceedingly difficult to assign conversational homework with the tools currently available. This reality ha...

The aim of this study was to examine if atypical parkinsonism affects the communicative ability in conversational interaction. Fifteen persons close to individuals with atypical parkinsonism answered a questionnaire, "Assessment of Change in Communicative Interaction" (ACCI), estimating perceived change in interactive skills compared to before the onset of the disease. The study also examined i...

This study investigated the relationship between conversational skills, speech production and academic achievement among children with autism spectrum disorder in special needs schools. The adopted a correlational survey design. Four research questions four corresponding hypotheses were raised formulated to guide study. population for this consists of all 80 male female pupils diagnosed ASD sev...

PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE IN CHILDREN WITH ASD AND OTHER DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS Pragmatic Competence in ASD Pragmatic skills enable children to produce and comprehend words and sentences in ways that are appropriate to the conversational context. While structural language is known to vary widely in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), pragmatic language has been claimed to be consistent...