Increasingly, technology developers are turning to interactive, intelligent kiosks to provide routine communicative functions such as greeting and informing people as they enter public, corporate, retail, or healthcare spaces. A number of studies have found intelligent kiosks to be usable with study participants reporting them to be appealing, useful, and even entertaining. However, the field s...

l2 research has shown that instruction in l2 pragmatics is necessary. the current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on efl learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. it also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the l2 classroom. iranian undergraduate students maj...

few, if any, studies have investigated the effect of professional experience as a rater variable and type of assessment as a task variable on raters’ criteria in the assessment of speech acts. this study aimed to explore the impact of nonnative teachers’ professional experience on the use of criteria in monologic and dialogic assessment of 12 role-plays of 3 apology speech acts. to this end, 60...

Recent studies suggest that the relationship between endogenous oxytocin and social affiliative behavior can be critically moderated by contextual and individual factors in humans. While oxytocin has been shown to influence human-directed affiliative behaviors in dogs, no study investigated yet how such factors moderate these effects. Our study aimed to investigate whether the context and the d...

We have constructed a questionnaire to investigate the separation behavior in a sample of family dogs (Canis familiaris) (N = 45) and in parallel we have observed dogs’ separationrelated behavior in a simple behavioral test (Separation and greeting test, S&G). We recorded the dogs’ behavior during the separation from and reunion (greeting) with the owner. We investigated whether owners’ report ...