Marco Marelli
Biographic Data
| ID | 3658716 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marco Marelli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marco |
| FAMILY NAME | Marelli |
| SIGNATURE | MARELLI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milano-Bicocca |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Conceptual Combination in Large Language Models: Uncovering Implicit Relational Interpretations in Compound Words With Contextualized Word Embeddings
Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as candidate models of human semantics, and as such, they must be able to account for conceptual combination. This work explores the ability of two LLMs, namely, BERT‐base and Llama‐2‐13b, to reveal the implicit meaning of existing and novel compound words. According to psycholinguistic theories, understanding the meaning of a compound (e.g., “snowman”) involves its automatic decomposition into cons…
A distributional model of concepts grounded in the spatial organization of objects
Data-driven models of concepts are gaining popularity in Psychology and Cognitive Science. Distributional semantic models represent word meanings as abstract word co-occurrence patterns, and excel at capturing human meaning intuitions about conceptual relationships; however, they lack the explicit links to the physical world that humans acquire through perception. Computer vision neural networks, on the other hand, can produce representations of …
On humans' (explicit) intuitions about the meaning of novel words
Rethinking First Language-Second Language Similarities and Differences in English Proficiency: Insights From the ENglish Reading Online (Enro) Project
This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate hi…
Form to meaning mapping and the impact of explicit morpheme combination in novel word processing
In the present study, we leveraged computational methods to explore the extent to which, relative to direct access to semantics from orthographic cues, the additional appreciation of morphological cues is advantageous while inducing the meaning of affixed pseudo-words. We re-analyzed data from a study on a lexical decision task for affixed pseudo-words. We considered a parsimonious model only including semantic variables (namely, semantic neighbo…
Caoss and transcendence: Modeling role-dependent constituent meanings in compounds
Many theories on the role of semantics in morphological representation and processing focus on the interplay between the lexicalized meaning of the complex word on the one hand, and the individual constituent meanings on the other hand. However, the constituent meaning representations at play do not necessarily correspond to the free-word meanings of the constituents: Role-dependent constituent meanings can be subject to sometimes substantial sem…
Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders
People with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) show anomalies in language processing with respect to "who is doing what" in an action. This linguistic behavior is suggestive of an atypical representation of the formal concepts of "Agent" in the lexical representation of a verb, i.e., its thematic grid. To test this hypothesis, we administered a silent-reading task with sentences including a semantic violation of the animacy trait of the gramm…
Mechanisms for handling nested dependencies in neural-network language models and humans
Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience
English spelling provides multiple cues to word meaning, and these cues are readily exploited by skilled readers. In two crowdsourcing studies, we tested skilled readers' sensitivity to a large number of morphological as well as nonmorphological orthographic cues by asking them to classify nonwords as adjectives or nouns. We observed a substantial variability across individuals and orthographic cues. In this paper, we discuss some sources of this…
Vector-Space Models of Semantic Representation From a Cognitive Perspective: A Discussion of Common Misconceptions
Models that represent meaning as high-dimensional numerical vectors—such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), bound encoding of the aggregate language environment (BEAGLE), topic models, global vectors (GloVe), and word2vec—have been introduced as extremely powerful machine-learning proxies for human semantic representations and have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past 2 decades. However, despit…
No Delay for Some Inferences
We present an eye-tracking study on the incremental derivation of the some-but-not-all scalar implicature (SI) associated to the scalar quantifier some. This question has been the matter of a vivid debate, both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics (Chemla & Singh 2014a,b). Experimentally, it was addressed by means of eye-tracking and different results were obtained: while Huang & Snedeker (2009) found evidence for a delay of some with respect …
External syntax and the Cumulative Effect in subject sub-extraction: An experimental evaluation
In this paper, we test the Cumulative Effect proposed by (Haegeman et al. 2014. Deconstructing the subject condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation
The only one strategy in context
Integration of base rates and new information in an abstract hypothesis‐testing task
In two studies, we investigated how people use base rates and the presence versus the absence of new information to judge which of two hypotheses is more likely. Participants were given problems based on two decks of cards printed with 0–4 letters. A table showed the relative frequencies of the letters on the cards within each deck. Participants were told the letters that were printed on or absent from a card the experimenter had drawn. Base rate…
Rethinking First Language-Second Language Similarities and Differences in English Proficiency: Insights From the ENglish Reading Online (Enro) Project
This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate hi…
Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders
People with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) show anomalies in language processing with respect to "who is doing what" in an action. This linguistic behavior is suggestive of an atypical representation of the formal concepts of "Agent" in the lexical representation of a verb, i.e., its thematic grid. To test this hypothesis, we administered a silent-reading task with sentences including a semantic violation of the animacy trait of the gramm…
Integration of base rates and new information in an abstract hypothesis‐testing task
In two studies, we investigated how people use base rates and the presence versus the absence of new information to judge which of two hypotheses is more likely. Participants were given problems based on two decks of cards printed with 0–4 letters. A table showed the relative frequencies of the letters on the cards within each deck. Participants were told the letters that were printed on or absent from a card the experimenter had drawn. Base rate…
The only one strategy in context
No Delay for Some Inferences
We present an eye-tracking study on the incremental derivation of the some-but-not-all scalar implicature (SI) associated to the scalar quantifier some. This question has been the matter of a vivid debate, both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics (Chemla & Singh 2014a,b). Experimentally, it was addressed by means of eye-tracking and different results were obtained: while Huang & Snedeker (2009) found evidence for a delay of some with respect …
External syntax and the Cumulative Effect in subject sub-extraction: An experimental evaluation
In this paper, we test the Cumulative Effect proposed by (Haegeman et al. 2014. Deconstructing the subject condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation
Vector-Space Models of Semantic Representation From a Cognitive Perspective: A Discussion of Common Misconceptions
Models that represent meaning as high-dimensional numerical vectors—such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), bound encoding of the aggregate language environment (BEAGLE), topic models, global vectors (GloVe), and word2vec—have been introduced as extremely powerful machine-learning proxies for human semantic representations and have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past 2 decades. However, despit…
Mechanisms for handling nested dependencies in neural-network language models and humans
Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience
English spelling provides multiple cues to word meaning, and these cues are readily exploited by skilled readers. In two crowdsourcing studies, we tested skilled readers' sensitivity to a large number of morphological as well as nonmorphological orthographic cues by asking them to classify nonwords as adjectives or nouns. We observed a substantial variability across individuals and orthographic cues. In this paper, we discuss some sources of this…
Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders
People with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) show anomalies in language processing with respect to "who is doing what" in an action. This linguistic behavior is suggestive of an atypical representation of the formal concepts of "Agent" in the lexical representation of a verb, i.e., its thematic grid. To test this hypothesis, we administered a silent-reading task with sentences including a semantic violation of the animacy trait of the gramm…
Form to meaning mapping and the impact of explicit morpheme combination in novel word processing
In the present study, we leveraged computational methods to explore the extent to which, relative to direct access to semantics from orthographic cues, the additional appreciation of morphological cues is advantageous while inducing the meaning of affixed pseudo-words. We re-analyzed data from a study on a lexical decision task for affixed pseudo-words. We considered a parsimonious model only including semantic variables (namely, semantic neighbo…
Caoss and transcendence: Modeling role-dependent constituent meanings in compounds
Many theories on the role of semantics in morphological representation and processing focus on the interplay between the lexicalized meaning of the complex word on the one hand, and the individual constituent meanings on the other hand. However, the constituent meaning representations at play do not necessarily correspond to the free-word meanings of the constituents: Role-dependent constituent meanings can be subject to sometimes substantial sem…
On humans' (explicit) intuitions about the meaning of novel words
Rethinking First Language-Second Language Similarities and Differences in English Proficiency: Insights From the ENglish Reading Online (Enro) Project
This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate hi…
Conceptual Combination in Large Language Models: Uncovering Implicit Relational Interpretations in Compound Words With Contextualized Word Embeddings
Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as candidate models of human semantics, and as such, they must be able to account for conceptual combination. This work explores the ability of two LLMs, namely, BERT‐base and Llama‐2‐13b, to reveal the implicit meaning of existing and novel compound words. According to psycholinguistic theories, understanding the meaning of a compound (e.g., “snowman”) involves its automatic decomposition into cons…
A distributional model of concepts grounded in the spatial organization of objects
Data-driven models of concepts are gaining popularity in Psychology and Cognitive Science. Distributional semantic models represent word meanings as abstract word co-occurrence patterns, and excel at capturing human meaning intuitions about conceptual relationships; however, they lack the explicit links to the physical world that humans acquire through perception. Computer vision neural networks, on the other hand, can produce representations of …
Computer Science (12 works) · Linguistics (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Natural language processing (8 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Cognition (5 works) · Cognitive science (5 works)