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Language and Cognition Lab
Imagine that you step outside your front door and you find an alien in underpants. Sure, it's听unlikely. Still, just few words can get you to imagine an alien in underpants outside your front door! How can words do that?
Using听tools from psychology, cognitive neuroscience and computational modelling, our research focuses on the cognitive and neurobiological basis of human communication. We study听濒补苍驳耻补驳别听颈苍听the setting in which it has听evolved, is learned听and is commonly used:听face-to-face,听multimodal听environments. Seeking converging evidence from different languages and populations, we听explore how communication听enables humans to learn about new objects, ideas and听imaginary worlds.
Multimodal Communication
In face-to-face interactions,听communication comprises a wealth of multimodal signals 鈥� such as gestures, eyegaze, and intonation 鈥� alongside linguistic input.听
Explore our take on multimodal communication in the presentation听Ecological Language听(Abralin ao Vivo, 2021) and paper听听(Murgiano, Motamedi & Vigliocco, 2021).
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ECOLANG
ECOLANG presents听a new approach to the study of language in its core ecological niche: face-to-face, multimodal environments.
The ECOLANG Multimodal Corpus provides audiovisual recordings and annotation of multimodal communicative behaviours by English-speaking adults and children engaged in semi-naturalistic conversation.
ECOLANG provides ecologically valid data for cognitive scientists and neuroscientists interested in addressing questions concerning real-world language acquisition, production and comprehension, and for computer scientists to develop multimodal language models and more human-like artificial agents.
