Color adjectives tend to be used redundantly in referential communication. I propose that redundant color adjectives (RCAs) are often intended to exploit a color contrast in the visual context and hence facilitate object identification, despite not being necessary to establish unique reference. Two language-production experiments investigated two types of factors that may affect the use of RCAs...

This study tested the impact of implicit and explicit knowledge of grammar on learners’ use of oral communication strategies (OCSs) and the interface of OCSs and oral fluency. The study was performed on 24 male and 36 female Iranian university students of English Translation studying at Payame Nour Universities of Lar, Khonj, and Evaz chosen based on availability and ease of access. The data we...

Successful dialogue frequently requires that interlocutors construct and align their conceptualizations of referents. This study presents data from a referential communication experiment the manipulates contextual factors such as the availability of feedback and role constancy in order to investigate how conversational partners reconcile their perspectives in the face of mutual uncertainty abou...

Dogs discriminate human direction of attention cues, such as body, gaze, head and eye orientation, in several circumstances. Eye contact particularly seems to provide information on human readiness to communicate; when there is such an ostensive cue, dogs tend to follow human communicative gestures more often. However, little is known about how such cues influence the production of communicativ...

Communication depends on the production and interpretation of representations, but the study of representational processes underlying communication finds little discussion in computational experiments. Here we present an experiment on the emergence of both interpretation and production of multiple representations, with multiple referents, where referential processes can be tracked. Results show...

with Bill Frost that was begun in Getting's lab. I also have been very interested in the evolution of neural circuits. As a graduate student, I was influenced by the work of Dorothy Paul and Edmund Arbus. I think that understanding a neural circuit means also understanding its evolutionary history. It's a mistake to try to analyze a circuit as if it were 'created' for its current function. Spea...

BACKGROUND There appear to be two kinds of delusion of reference, which vary independently: delusions of observation and delusions of communication. It has been suggested that delusions of communication might derive from an impairment in reality discrimination, though the impairment would be centred on non-verbal channels in delusions of communication as opposed to verbal channels in auditory h...

Parents of many bird species produce alarm calls when they approach and deter a nest predator in order to defend their offspring. Alarm calls have been shown to warn nestlings about predatory threats, but parents also face a similar risk of predation when incubating eggs in their nests. Here, I show that incubating female Japanese great tits, Parus minor, assess predation risk by conspecific al...

From soon after their first birthdays young children are able tomake inferences from a communicator’s referential act (e.g., pointing to a container) to her overall social goal for communication (e.g., to inform that a searched-for toy is inside; see Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2005; Behne, Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2012). But in such cases the inferential distance between referent...