Professor Gabriella Vigliocco, University College London
Ecological Language: A multimodal approach to language learning and processing
The human brain has evolved the ability to support communication in complex and dynamic environments. In such environments, language is learned, and mostly used in face-to-face contexts in which processing and learning is based on multiple cues: linguistic (such as lexical, syntactic), but also discourse, prosody, face and hands (gestures). Yet, our understanding of how language is learnt and processed comes for the most from reductionist approaches in which the multimodal signal is reduced to speech or text.
I will introduce our current programme of research that investigates language in real-world settings in which learning and processing are intertwined and the listener/learner has access to -- and therefore can take advantage of -- the multiple cues provided by the speaker. I will then describe studies that aim at characterising the distribution of the multimodal cues in the language used by caregivers when interacting with their children (mostly 2-3 years old) and provide data concerning how these cues are differentially distributed depending upon whether the child knows the objects being talked about (learning vs. processing), and whether the objects are present (situated vs. displaced). I will then move to a study using EEG addressing the question of how discourse but crucially also the non-linguistic cues modulate predictions about the next word in a sentence.
I will conclude discussing the insights we have and (especially) can gain using this real world, more ecologically valid, approach to the study of language.
About the speaker
Professor Gabriella Vigliocco’s research explores issues surrounding language in a social context: How can language enable humans to share experiences? How do children learn to associate words with meaning? And how is this accomplished in the brain? Research carried out in her laboratory concerns psychological and neural mechanisms of human language use with a special emphasis on how conceptual and linguistic information are integrated. The lab’s most important contributions to date include development of a theoretical framework for sentence production, and development of explicit computational models of lexical semantic representation informed by cognitive science and neuroscience. At present, they have two main projects addressing: (1) the relationship between language and thought in spoken and signed languages; (2) the representation of abstract knowledge.
Further information
Windsor Auditorium