About us

The Lab

The Language, Learning and Reading lab studies...well, language, learning and reading. Currently, we're particularly focusing on words' internal structure (linguists call this Morphology), and how this structure might determine the way we humans learn to identify those strange (and ubiquitous) visual objects called words. We're also trying to understand how much this process is reducible to fundamental, general-purpose learning procedures (such as associative, discriminative and probabilistic learning), and how much this is instead language-specific. We also like word meanings -- we investigate what does it mean that words have meanings, and how the brain computes all this. In addition, we also conduct a number of smaller scale projects on, e.g., speech perception, valenced words such as love and death, and the learning of a second language.
We address all this through a very interdiscipinary approach -- we use chronometry, eye tracking, electrophysiology, neuropsychology, computational modelling, fMRI, MEG (and, in principle, whatever else) according to which method is more suited for the specific question we're asking. Accordingly, the group is very diverse in terms of background -- we're currently around 15 people, whose original specialty varies from experimental psychology to linguistics, from epistemology to mathematics. We like scientific cross-breeding!    

If you want to know about us more in depth, you can visit our Research pages, where you can learn more on how we spend our days.
Or you can take a look at our publications here.
Or you can go to the People pages and meet the team. 
We also have an official lab userguide (attached below), which illustrates our research philosophy and (hopefully) gives you a taste of the lab atmosphere -- prospective collaborators are warmly encouraged to take a look before contacting Davide.

And if at the end of your website tour you feel sooo fascinated that you've got a pressing urge to contact us ;-) here's a page that tells you everything about how to reach the lab and its members.

Thanks for your interest in our work!
Davide and the team