Imagine that you step outside your front door and you find an alien in underpants. Sure, it's unlikely. Still, just few words can get you to imagine an alien in underpants outside your front door! How can words do that?
Using tools from psychology, cognitive neuroscience and computational modelling, our research focuses on the cognitive and neurobiological basis of human communication. We study language in the setting in which it has evolved, is learned and is commonly used: face-to-face, multimodal environments. Seeking converging evidence from different languages and populations, we explore how communication enables humans to learn about new objects, ideas and imaginary worlds.
Multimodal Communication
In face-to-face interactions, communication comprises a wealth of multimodal signals – such as gestures, eyegaze, and intonation – alongside linguistic input.
Explore our take on multimodal communication in the presentation Ecological Language (Abralin ao Vivo, 2021) and paper Situating Language in the Real-World (Murgiano, Motamedi & Vigliocco, 2021).
ECOLANG Corpus
ECOLANG presents 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.
Get in touch
Are you a prospective student or intern? A potential collaborator? A parent or caregiver interested in how children learn new words and concepts? Get in touch!
Recent Opinion Papers
Written with colleagues from engineering, architecture, computer science and education, Ecological Brain: Reframing the Study of Human Behaviour and Cognition presents our view on how to conceptualise and carry out real-world reseach.
Learning from others is good, with others is better (De Felice et al., 2022) explores new directions for experiments investigating how knowledge is acquired in its ecological niche: socially, in face-to-face, multimodal environments.