The Department of Cognitive, Social and Organizational Psychology is organizing a conference on May 26th at 12:00 pm in the Audiovisual Room of the Faculty of Psychology and Speech Therapy. The conference will be given by guest professor Gabriella Vigliocco, director of the Cognition and Language Laboratory (University College London, UK), on her research on language processing in natural environments.

The conference entitled 'Real-world language learning and processing' will discuss the main environment in which language is learned and that in adulthood the most used is face-to-face, however, most of what we know about language learning and processing comes from laboratory studies in which the rich multimodal and social context of language use is removed.

This talk will present the results of naturalistic and experimental studies on word learning (in preschool children and adults) and experimental studies on processing (in monolingual and bilingual adults) that demonstrate how the rich multimodal and social context plays an important role and, therefore, must be taken into account in our theories and in the design of our studies.

Gabriella Vigliocco's research focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of language processing, emphasizing the relationship between language and cognition. Her laboratory adopts an interlinguistic (encompassing both spoken and sign languages) and interdisciplinary approach, utilizing tools from cognitive psychology and computational and cognitive neuroscience.