Gabriella Vigliocco

Gabriella Vigliocco is an Italian experimental psychologist who conducts research in the field of psycholinguistics, focusing on psychological factors and neural mechanisms underlying people's ability to produce and understand language . Vigliocco's interdisciplinary work draws from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling. where she is also the director of the Language and Cognition Lab and the director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme.

Vigliocco was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award She is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for Psychological Sciences. She then went on to complete her postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona with Merrill Garrett.

Vigliocco is Professor of Psychology at the University College of London (UCL). At UCL, she leads the Language and Cognition Lab. She was the Head of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department from 2008 to 2010 and the Acting Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences from 2010 to 2011. Subsequently, Vigliocco served as the Vice Dean of Education from 2014 to 2018.

Vigliocco has held grants from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, Leverhulme Trust, European Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council to study a wide range of topics, including semantic fields, early language acquisition, iconicity, and social influences on learning. She is an active member of Women in Cognitive Science. As a public speaker, she has been featured in the People Behind the Science Podcast series and at various conferences and events.

Outside of her academic work, Vigliocco enjoys spending time with her son and family, cooking, reading, and going to classical music concerts. She conducts experimental studies examining how language is learned in the context of multimodal, face-to-face communication, with a focus on multimodal signals that include representational gestures, eye contact, emotional expression, and intonation. It is through these signals that individuals can communicate turn-taking and abstract meaning. and how iconicity enhances language processing and development. In one of her most cited papers, Vigliocco and colleagues found that people using both sign and spoken languages leverage iconicity in language processing to help bridge the gap between linguistic forms and conceptual representations. Vigliocco and her colleagues found that caregivers were inclined to include iconic symbols in their language and communication with children when the objects they were referring to were not present, suggesting that gesture is used to aid language development.

Representative publications Kousta, S.-T., Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D. P., Andrews, M., & Del Campo, E. (2011). The representation of abstract words: Why emotion matters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(1), 14–34. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021446 Meteyard, L., Cuadrado, S. R., Bahrami, B., & Vigliocco, G. (2012). Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics. Cortex, 48(7), 788–804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2010.11.002 Perniss, P., Thompson, R. L., & Vigliocco, G. (2010). Iconicity as a general property of language: evidence from spoken and signed languages. Frontiers in psychology, 1, 227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00227 Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D. P., Druks, J., Barber, H., & Cappa, S. F. (2011). Nouns and verbs in the brain: A review of behavioural, electrophysiological, neuropsychological and imaging studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(3), 407–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.04.007