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Our interdisciplinary group includes psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, speech therapists and linguists.
Principal investigator Gabriella Vigliocco
I am Professor of the Psychology of Language in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London. I received my PhD from University of Trieste in 1995, was a post-doc at University of Arizona, and after being at University of Wisconsin as Assistant Professor and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as a visiting scientist (1999-2000) I moved to UCL.
I lead a team composed of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists sharing the vision that understanding language and cognition requires integration of multiple levels of analysis and methodological approaches. The overarching goal of our work is understanding how language and other aspects of cognitive functioning relate to each other.
The main research focus of my research at present is on understanding natural language. This is funded by grants from ERC and ESRC.
I am also the Director for the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme in the Ecological Study of the Brain. The DTP is a 4-year PhD programme providing cutting-edge interdisciplinary training in the study of brain and behaviour in the real-world.
Lab Members
Post-doctoral Researchers
Greg Woodin
Greg Woodin is a Research Fellow in Data Sciences in the Language and Cognition Lab. He is investigating how social interactions between caregivers and children influence early vocabulary growth. This work is part of a project led by Professor Gabriella Vigliocco. Greg’s background spans cognitive science, linguistics, and psychology.
His research combines computational corpus methods, data science techniques—including Bayesian modelling and machine learning—and experimental approaches to investigate multimodal communication and numerical cognition. He is particularly interested in gesture, iconicity, metaphor, and data visualization. A strong advocate of open science, Greg promotes the use of open-source programming languages (R and Python) and rigorous statistical analyses in research.
Click here to view Greg Woodin's profile page
PhD Students
Isobel Chick
Isobel is a PhD student in the Language and Cognition Lab with a background in speech and language therapy. Her research explores whether gestures support language recovery in aphasia, a communication disorder commonly caused by stroke, with the eventual goal of developing individualised language rehabilitation pathways for people with aphasia.
Chris Edwards
Chris is a PhD student interested in how visual information and social interaction influence adults’ learning of new words and their associated conceptual meanings. He previously studied English Literature at the University of Oxford and Psychological Sciences at UCL.
Click here to view Chris Edwards' profile page
Viktor Kewenig
Viktor is a PhD student in the Leverhulme Ecological Brain DTP. He is mainly interested in the effects of multimodal context on natural language comprehension in humans and computers.
Click here to view Viktor Kewenig's profile page
Gal Rozic
Gal is a PhD candidate in the Ecological Brain Doctoral Training Programme. She has a background in psychology, language sciences, and neuroscience. Her research investigates abstract language development in children within naturalistic social interactions. She works with multimodal data (including natural language processing, eye gaze, and gestures) and uses fNIRS hyperscanning to understand the behavioural and neural synchronisation patterns underlying children’s learning of novel concepts within face-to-face communication.
Click here to view Gal Rozic's profile page
MSc Students
Dora Szegedi
I'm Dora Szegedi, I am a postgraduate student at UCL, and I work as a research assistant at ECOLANG. Here to assist with anything!
Siqi Yi
Siqi is an MSci Psychology student at UCL, interested in how the use of gestures influences children’s learning of abstract concepts during interactions with caregivers. Starting in September 2025, Siqi will pursue a PhD in Psychology at McGill University, focusing on social cognition and attention.
Lab Associates
Dr Ed Donnellan
Research Fellow in Multimodal Communication and ECOLANG Project Manager (2021-2023), Honorary Research Fellow (from 2023)
Ed is currently a research fellow at the University of Warwick, and an honorary research fellow at UCL. He project-managed the final phase of annotating and publicly releasing the ECOLANG corpus during his time as a research fellow in the Language and Cognition Lab.Ed’s background is in developmental and comparative psychology. His research focuses on multimodal communication in both humans and chimpanzees, factors contributing to early language development (from infancy to 4 years of age) and how information-seeking behaviours (e.g., curiosity) drive learning.
Dr Yan Gu
ECOLANG Post Doc (2018-2019), Research Fellow (2019-2022), Honorary Research Fellow (from 2022)
I obtained my PhD in psycholinguistics at Tilburg University, Netherlands. After being a postdoc and research fellow at the UCL Language and Cognition Lab, I joined the University of Essex in 2022. My research mainly covers two areas, including the perception of time and the impact of language use.
I study language as a multimodal phenomenon (e.g., speech, text, gestures, intonation, gazing), and investigate the impact of using language on different aspects, such as (1) does language shape thought? (2) child-directed language and children's word learning; (3) the effect of immigrants' language proficiency on economic outcomes; (4) and research connecting language use and other fields.
Former Lab Members
Antonia Jordan Barros
Research Assistant
Antonia Jordan Barros works as a Research Assistant on the Ecolang project in the Language and Cognition Group. Antonia's research interests are the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language processing and language development. Prior to her work at UCL, Antonia obtained a M.Sc. degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Donders Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands as well as a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Manchester. From October 2023 onwards, Antonia will pursue a PhD in Neuropsychology at the ToddlerLab at Birkbeck, University of London funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) while continuing to work in the lab part-time.
Click here to view Antonia Jordan Barros' profile page
Francesco Cabiddu
Post-doc
Francesco is a research data analyst in the Language and Cognition Lab under Professor Gabriella Vigliocco. He assists in designing analytic procedures to address key questions related to language development and comprehension using data from the ECOLANG corpus of multimodal communication.
Francesco's background is in developmental psychology and language acquisition. His research has focused on studying the domain-general cognitive processes (e.g., learning from associations; drawing analogies) that may underlie infants and children's vocabulary processing and learning in naturalistic settings. Francesco has combined different methodological approaches, including corpus analyses, behavioural evidence from adults and children, and computational modelling.
Harriet Hill-Payne
Research Assistant
Harriet joined the Language and Cognition Lab in 2023, while completing the MSc in Psychological Sciences at UCL.
Previously, Harriet worked in the museum sector, most recently as Programmes Manager at The Ruskin – Museum & Research Centre at Lancaster University. Here, her interest shifted from literature, visual and material culture as the object of study, to the cognitive mechanisms or ‘mindsets’ that these help to shape.
Harriet studied English Literature at the University of Manchester, with her MA funded by UoM.
Miguel Oliveira
Guest Researcher
Miguel Oliveira Jr is a guest researcher at the Language and Cognition Lab. He also works as an associate professor at the Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, where he leads the fonUFAL research group (fale.ufal.br/grupopesquisa/fonufal/) and the Lapelc² laboratory (fale.ufal.br/laboratorio/lapelc/),. His main research interests are prosody, speech perception and phonetics.
Ximing Shao
Post-doc