Main Projects

The Lab's work is centered around three main lines of research, which cover words' internal structure (Linguistic Morphology), probabilistic learning in reading, word meaning and awareness. Discover more below!

Statistical learning and reading

Despite written language is not part of our genetic endowment, literate adults process an impressive amount of information as they read, and do that extremely flawlessly and nearly error–free. We investigate how much this is due to statistical learning; and study how this unfolds in the human mind and brain.

Perceptual experience and word meaning

How do we understand the meaning of words? How much of what we call word meaning is related to our motor and sensory experience, and how much is instead purely symbolic in nature? We address these questions by investigating whether/how people with different perceptual experience (e.g., early blind) process word meaning differently. 

Word meaning outside awareness

It is relatively uncontroversial that word meaning can give rise to behaviourally and neurally measurable phenomena even when words are perceived outside of awareness. It is less clear, however, exactly what kind of semantic information is extracted from unconsciously perceived words. We address this question by modeling word meaning quantitatively based on language use, and then testing in the lab which aspects of these computational models affects people's performance within and outside of awareness.