We argue that meta-dialog and meta-reasoning, far from being of only occasional use, are the very essence of conversation and communication between agents. We give four paradigm examples of massive use of meta-dialog where only limited object dialog may be present, and use these to bolster our claim of centrality for meta-dialog. We further illustrate this with related work in active logics. We argue moreover This research has been supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office. We thank Betsy Klipple, Tom Nelson, Clare Voss, and John Gurney for helpful discussion. y Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland. 1 that there may be a core set of meta-dialog principles that is in some sense complete, and that may correspond to the human ability to engage in "free-ranging" conversation. If we are right, then implementing such a set would be of considerable interest. We give examples of existing computer programs that converse inadequately according to our guidelines. 1

Abstract: It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief-desire psychology of four-year-old children and adults (so-called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children’s understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing ’ in the sense that it enables young children to participate in cultural activities using shared, perspectival symbols with a conventional/normative/reflective dimension—for example, linguistic communication and pretend play—thus inaugurating children’s understanding of things mental. Understanding beliefs and participating in collective intentionality at four years of age—enabling the comprehension of such things as money and marriage—results from several years of engagement with other persons in perspective-shifting and reflective discourse containing propositional attitude constructions. By all appearances, the cognitive skills of human beings are very different from those of other animal species, including our nearest primate relatives. Human

A fundamental step in sentence comprehension involves assigning semantic roles to sentence constituents. To accomplish this, the listener must parse the sentence, find constituents that are candidate arguments, and assign semantic roles to those constituents. Each step depends on prior lexical and syntactic knowledge. Where do children learning their first languages begin in solving this problem? In this paper we focus on the parsing and argumentidentification steps that precede Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) training. We combine a simplified SRL with an unsupervised HMM part of speech tagger, and experiment with psycholinguisticallymotivated ways to label clusters resulting from the HMM so that they can be used to parse input for the SRL system. The results show that proposed shallow representations of sentence structure are robust to reductions in parsing accuracy, and that the contribution of alternative representations of sentence structure to successful semantic role labeling varies with the integrity of the parsing and argumentidentification stages. 1

Different theories of SLA offer conflicting views of the relationship between metalinguistic task performance and oral production. We examined this relationship with respect to the possessive determiners ‘his/her’in English. Learners ’ oral production was elicited using a picture description task and described according to developmental stages;a parallelframework was developed to classifylearners’performance on a metalinguistic task. Two classes of French-speaking children in an intensive ESL programme in Quebec participated in the study. Both received instruction which can be characterised as communication-oriented. In addition, the Rule class was given metalinguisticinformation about the possessive determineragreementrule and participated in a seriesof cooperative learning activitieswhich provided practicein articulating and applying the rule. The Comparison class received no special treatment with respect to possessive determiners. We found that there was considerable correspondence between oral and metalinguistic task performance for the Comparison class. In contrast, the instructional intervention appeared to alter the relationship between performance on the two tasks in the Rule class. These findings are considered from the

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sensitivity in children with early focal brain injury and children with specific language impairment