The development of conversational and communication skills

This thesis investigates the development of children's conversational and communication skills. This is done by investigating both communicative process and outcome in two communication media: face-to-face interaction and audio-only interaction. Communicative outcome is objectively measured by assessing accuracy of performance of communication tasks. A multi-level approach to the assessment of communicative process is taken. Non-verbal aspects of process which are investigated are gaze and gesture. Verbal aspects of process range from global linguistic assessments such as length of conversational turn, to a detailed coding of utterance function according to Conversational Games analysis. The results show that children of 6 years and less do not adapt to the loss of visual signals in audio-only communication, and their performance suffers. Both the structure of children's dialogues and their use of visual signals were found to differ from that of adults. It is concluded that both verbal and non-verbal communication strategies develop into adulthood. Successful integration of these different aspects of communication is central to being an effective communicator

Framing the Psycho-Social and Cultural Aspects of Human-Machine Communication

In this introduction to the fourth volume of the journal Human-Machine Communication, we present and discuss the nine articles selected for inclusion. In this essay, we aim to frame some crucial psychological, sociological, and cultural aspects of this field of research. In particular, we situate the current scholarship from a historical perspective by (a) discussing humanity’s long walk with hybridity and otherness, at both the cultural and individual development levels, (b) considering how the organization of capital, labor, and gender relations serve as fundamental context for understanding HMC in the present day, and (c) contextualizing the development of the HMC field in light of seismic, contemporary shifts in society and the social sciences. We call on the community of researchers, students, and practitioners to ask the big questions, to ground research and theory in the past as well as the real and unfolding lifeworld of human-machine communication (including what HMC may become), and to claim a seat at the table during the earliest phases in design, testing, implementation, law and policy, and ethics to intervene for social good

How to Do Things Without Words: Infants, utterance-activity and distributed cognition

Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the hypothesis of an ‘Extended Mind’, maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of ‘language acquisition’ are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than ‘language’ as typically understood, the object of study is something called ‘utterance-activity’, a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans. It is argued that utterance activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants’ cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact

Language impairment and colour categories

Goldstein (1948) reported multiple cases of failure to categorise colours in patients that he termed amnesic or anomic aphasics. these patients have a particular difficulty in producing perceptual categories in the absence of other aphasic impairments. we hold that neuropsychological evidence supports the view that the task of colour categorisation is logically impossible without labels