Gabriella Vigliocco
Biographic Data
| ID | 1661212 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gabriella Vigliocco |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gabriella |
| FAMILY NAME | Vigliocco |
| SIGNATURE | VIGLIOCCO G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7190-3659 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Action and abstraction: Motor interference changes meaning in language understanding
Can the body shape meaning? Eight experiments (four preregistered) tested whether interfering with the motor system changes how people interpret language about actions. Participants (total N = 880) rhythmically moved their hands or feet while being presented with sentences describing hand or foot actions (e.g., “scoring a goal in soccer”) and asked to choose between two interpretations of their meaning: one more concrete (e.g., ”kicking a ball“) …
What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary
Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate…
Situating multimodal language acquisition in the real-world: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek
Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek make a clear case for moving to a multimodal framework across spoken and signed languages, and they reveal some key insights for language acquisition that can be gained from such a framework. Bringing together current findings on both the development of speech-gesture integration and sign language also highlights a number of desiderata for moving the field forward. Here, I present some elements of a possible framewor…
Language development beyond the here-and-now: Iconicity and displacement in child-directed communication
Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an audio-visual corpus of caregiver–child dyads, English-speaking caregivers interacted with their children (N = 71…
I don’t see what you’re saying: The maluma/takete effect does not depend on the visual appearance of phonemes as they are articulated
In contrast to the principle of arbitrariness, recent work has shown that language can iconically depict referents being talked about. One such example is the maluma/takete effect: an association between certain phonemes (e.g., those in maluma ) and round shapes, and other phonemes (e.g., those in takete and spiky shapes). An open question has been whether this association is crossmodal (arising from phonemes’ sound or kinesthetics) or unimodal (…
The role of iconic gestures and mouth movements in face-to-face communication
Human face-to-face communication is multimodal: it comprises speech as well as visual cues, such as articulatory and limb gestures. In the current study, we assess how iconic gestures and mouth movements influence audiovisual word recognition. We presented video clips of an actress uttering single words accompanied, or not, by more or less informative iconic gestures. For each word we also measured the informativeness of the mouth movements from …
Higher order factors of sound symbolism
Sound symbolism refers to associations between certain language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and perceptual and/or semantic properties. Crucially, the different associations of a phoneme do not appear to be wholly independent. For instance, the phoneme /i/ is associated with sharpness, smallness and brightness. Previous work has shown that these properties are all related to one another (Walker et al., 2012). This suggests that higher order factors ma…
The role of emotional valence in learning novel abstract concepts
A recent study by Ponari, Norbury, and Vigliocco (2018), showed that emotional valence (i.e. whether a word evokes positive, negative, or no affect) predicts age-of-acquisition ratings and that up to the age of 8-9, children know abstract emotional words better than neutral ones. On the basis of these findings, emotional valence has been argued to provide a bootstrapping mechanism for the acquisition of abstract concepts. However, no previous wor…
Language is less arbitrary than one thinks: Iconicity and Indexicality in real-world language learning and processing
In the last decade, a growing body of work has convincingly demonstrated that languages embed a certain degree of non-arbitrariness (mostly in the form of iconicity, namely the presence of imagistic links between linguistic form and meaning). Most of this previous work has been limited to assessing the degree (and role) of non-arbitrariness in the speech (for spoken languages) or manual components of signs (for sign languages). When approached in…
Onomatopoeia, gestures, actions and words: How Do Caregivers Use Multimodal Cues in Their Communication to Children
Most research on how children learn the mapping between words and world has assumed that language is arbitrary, and has investigated language learning in contexts in which objects referred to are present in the environment. Here, we report analyses of a semi-naturalistic corpus of caregivers talking to their 2-3 year-old. We focus on caregivers' use of non-arbitrary cues across different expressive channels: both iconic (onomatopoeia and represen…
Speech Production, Psychology of
Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers
Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and nonnative language have provided mixed results: Studies that have found differences between native language (L1) and second language (L2) processing attributed the difference to the fact that L2 learned late in life would not be processed affectively…
The bridge of iconicity: From a world of experience to the experience of language
Iconicity, a resemblance between properties of linguistic form (both in spoken and signed languages) and meaning, has traditionally been considered to be a marginal, irrelevant phenomenon for our understanding of language processing, development and evolution. Rather, the arbitrary and symbolic nature of language has long been taken as a design feature of the human linguistic system. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework in which ico…
The Neural Representation of Abstract Words: The Role of Emotion
It is generally assumed that abstract concepts are linguistically coded, in line with imaging evidence of greater engagement of the left perisylvian language network for abstract than concrete words (Binder JR, Desai RH, Graves WW, Conant LL. 2009. Where is the semantic system? A critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex. 19:2767-2796; Wang J, Conder JA, Blitzer DN, Shinkareva SV. 2010. Neural repre…
Language as a multimodal phenomenon: Implications for language learning, processing and evolution
Our understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language has traditionally been firmly based on spoken Indo-European languages and on language studied as speech or text. However, in face-to-face communication, language is multimodal: speech signals are invariably accompanied by visual information on the face and in manual gestures, and sign languages deploy multiple channels (hands, face and body) in utterance construction. Moreove…
Giving Words Meaning
Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics
The representation of abstract words: Why emotion matters.
Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental…
Nouns and verbs in the brain: A review of behavioural, electrophysiological, neuropsychological and imaging studies
Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages
Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, i…
Toward a theory of semantic representation
We present an account of semantic representation that focuses on distinct types of information from which word meanings can be learned. In particular, we argue that there are at least two major types of information from which we learn word meanings. The first is what we call experiential information. This is data derived both from our sensory-motor interactions with the outside world, as well as from our experience of own inner states, particular…
Emotion words, regardless of polarity, have a processing advantage over neutral words
Integrating experiential and distributional data to learn semantic representations
The authors identify 2 major types of statistical data from which semantic representations can be learned. These are denoted as experiential data and distributional data. Experiential data are derived by way of experience with the physical world and comprise the sensory-motor data obtained through sense receptors. Distributional data, by contrast, describe the statistical distribution of words across spoken and written language. The authors claim…
Subject-verb agreement errors in French and English: The role of syntactic hierarchy
We report two parallel experiments conducted in French and in English in which we induced subject-verb agreement errors to explore the role of syntactic structure during sentence production. Previous studies have shown that attraction errors (i.e., a tendency of the verb to agree with an immediately preceding noun instead of with the subject of the sentence) occur when a preverbal local noun disagrees in number with the subject head noun. The att…
The interplay of meaning, sound, and syntax in sentence production
A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors' 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of inf…
Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages
Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, i…
The interplay of meaning, sound, and syntax in sentence production
A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors' 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of inf…
Syntactic Accuracy in Sentence Production: The Case of Gender Disagreement in Italian Language-Impaired and Unimpaired Speakers
The role of emotional valence in learning novel abstract concepts
A recent study by Ponari, Norbury, and Vigliocco (2018), showed that emotional valence (i.e. whether a word evokes positive, negative, or no affect) predicts age-of-acquisition ratings and that up to the age of 8-9, children know abstract emotional words better than neutral ones. On the basis of these findings, emotional valence has been argued to provide a bootstrapping mechanism for the acquisition of abstract concepts. However, no previous wor…
Constructing Subject-Verb Agreement in Speech: The Role of Semantic and Morphological Factors
Syntactic Accuracy in Sentence Production: The Case of Gender Disagreement in Italian Language-Impaired and Unimpaired Speakers
Subject-verb agreement errors in French and English: The role of syntactic hierarchy
We report two parallel experiments conducted in French and in English in which we induced subject-verb agreement errors to explore the role of syntactic structure during sentence production. Previous studies have shown that attraction errors (i.e., a tendency of the verb to agree with an immediately preceding noun instead of with the subject of the sentence) occur when a preverbal local noun disagrees in number with the subject head noun. The att…
The interplay of meaning, sound, and syntax in sentence production
A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors' 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of inf…
Toward a theory of semantic representation
We present an account of semantic representation that focuses on distinct types of information from which word meanings can be learned. In particular, we argue that there are at least two major types of information from which we learn word meanings. The first is what we call experiential information. This is data derived both from our sensory-motor interactions with the outside world, as well as from our experience of own inner states, particular…
Emotion words, regardless of polarity, have a processing advantage over neutral words
Integrating experiential and distributional data to learn semantic representations
The authors identify 2 major types of statistical data from which semantic representations can be learned. These are denoted as experiential data and distributional data. Experiential data are derived by way of experience with the physical world and comprise the sensory-motor data obtained through sense receptors. Distributional data, by contrast, describe the statistical distribution of words across spoken and written language. The authors claim…
Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages
Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, i…
The representation of abstract words: Why emotion matters.
Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental…
Nouns and verbs in the brain: A review of behavioural, electrophysiological, neuropsychological and imaging studies
Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics
Giving Words Meaning
The bridge of iconicity: From a world of experience to the experience of language
Iconicity, a resemblance between properties of linguistic form (both in spoken and signed languages) and meaning, has traditionally been considered to be a marginal, irrelevant phenomenon for our understanding of language processing, development and evolution. Rather, the arbitrary and symbolic nature of language has long been taken as a design feature of the human linguistic system. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework in which ico…
The Neural Representation of Abstract Words: The Role of Emotion
It is generally assumed that abstract concepts are linguistically coded, in line with imaging evidence of greater engagement of the left perisylvian language network for abstract than concrete words (Binder JR, Desai RH, Graves WW, Conant LL. 2009. Where is the semantic system? A critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex. 19:2767-2796; Wang J, Conder JA, Blitzer DN, Shinkareva SV. 2010. Neural repre…
Language as a multimodal phenomenon: Implications for language learning, processing and evolution
Our understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language has traditionally been firmly based on spoken Indo-European languages and on language studied as speech or text. However, in face-to-face communication, language is multimodal: speech signals are invariably accompanied by visual information on the face and in manual gestures, and sign languages deploy multiple channels (hands, face and body) in utterance construction. Moreove…
Speech Production, Psychology of
Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers
Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and nonnative language have provided mixed results: Studies that have found differences between native language (L1) and second language (L2) processing attributed the difference to the fact that L2 learned late in life would not be processed affectively…
Onomatopoeia, gestures, actions and words: How Do Caregivers Use Multimodal Cues in Their Communication to Children
Most research on how children learn the mapping between words and world has assumed that language is arbitrary, and has investigated language learning in contexts in which objects referred to are present in the environment. Here, we report analyses of a semi-naturalistic corpus of caregivers talking to their 2-3 year-old. We focus on caregivers' use of non-arbitrary cues across different expressive channels: both iconic (onomatopoeia and represen…
The role of emotional valence in learning novel abstract concepts
A recent study by Ponari, Norbury, and Vigliocco (2018), showed that emotional valence (i.e. whether a word evokes positive, negative, or no affect) predicts age-of-acquisition ratings and that up to the age of 8-9, children know abstract emotional words better than neutral ones. On the basis of these findings, emotional valence has been argued to provide a bootstrapping mechanism for the acquisition of abstract concepts. However, no previous wor…
Language is less arbitrary than one thinks: Iconicity and Indexicality in real-world language learning and processing
In the last decade, a growing body of work has convincingly demonstrated that languages embed a certain degree of non-arbitrariness (mostly in the form of iconicity, namely the presence of imagistic links between linguistic form and meaning). Most of this previous work has been limited to assessing the degree (and role) of non-arbitrariness in the speech (for spoken languages) or manual components of signs (for sign languages). When approached in…
The role of iconic gestures and mouth movements in face-to-face communication
Human face-to-face communication is multimodal: it comprises speech as well as visual cues, such as articulatory and limb gestures. In the current study, we assess how iconic gestures and mouth movements influence audiovisual word recognition. We presented video clips of an actress uttering single words accompanied, or not, by more or less informative iconic gestures. For each word we also measured the informativeness of the mouth movements from …
Higher order factors of sound symbolism
Sound symbolism refers to associations between certain language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and perceptual and/or semantic properties. Crucially, the different associations of a phoneme do not appear to be wholly independent. For instance, the phoneme /i/ is associated with sharpness, smallness and brightness. Previous work has shown that these properties are all related to one another (Walker et al., 2012). This suggests that higher order factors ma…
I don’t see what you’re saying: The maluma/takete effect does not depend on the visual appearance of phonemes as they are articulated
In contrast to the principle of arbitrariness, recent work has shown that language can iconically depict referents being talked about. One such example is the maluma/takete effect: an association between certain phonemes (e.g., those in maluma ) and round shapes, and other phonemes (e.g., those in takete and spiky shapes). An open question has been whether this association is crossmodal (arising from phonemes’ sound or kinesthetics) or unimodal (…
Language development beyond the here-and-now: Iconicity and displacement in child-directed communication
Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an audio-visual corpus of caregiver–child dyads, English-speaking caregivers interacted with their children (N = 71…
What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary
Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate…
Psychology (21 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (16 works) · Cognitive psychology (15 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (10 works) · Cognition (9 works) · Natural language processing (9 works) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (8 works)