How does the brain handle semantic composition? Our new Cerebral Cortex paper shows the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA45) does it automatically, even when task-irrelevant. We used fMRI + computational models. Congrats Marco Ciapparelli, Marco Marelli & team! doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

🚨 New publication: How to improve conceptual clarity in psychological science? Thrilled to see this article with @ruimata.bsky.social out. We discuss how LLMs can be leveraged to map, clarify, and generate psychological measures and constructs. Open access article: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

A fascinating read in @theguardian.com on the psycholinguistics of swearing! Did you know Germans averaged 53 taboo words, while Brits e Spaniards listed only 16? Great to see the work of our colleague Simone Sulpizio & Jon Andoni Duñabeitia highlighted! 👏 www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Join us for our next seminar! We're excited to host Hsieh Cheng-Yu (University of London) He'll discuss "Making sense from the parts: What Chinese compounds tell us about reading," exploring how we process ambiguity & meaning consistency 🗓️ 27th Oct ⏰ 2PM (CET)📍UniMiB 💻 meet.google.com/zvk-owhv-tfw

I'm sharing a Colab notebook on using large language models for cognitive science! GitHub repo: github.com/MarcoCiappar... It's geared toward psychologists & linguists and covers extracting embeddings, predictability measures, comparing models across languages & modalities (vision). see examples 🧵

New paper! 🚨 I argue that LLMs represent a synthesis between distributed and symbolic approaches to language, because, when exposed to language, they develop highly symbolic representations and processing mechanisms in addition to distributed ones. arxiv.org/abs/2502.11856

Important fMRI/RSA study by @marcociapparelli.bsky.social et al. Compositional (multiplicative) representations of compounds/phrases in left IFG (BA45), mSTS, ATL; left AG encodes constituents, not their composition, weighing the right element more, vice versa IFG 🧠🧩 academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

Great week at #ESLP2025 in Aix-en-Provence! Huge congrats to our colleagues for their excellent talks on computational models, sound symbolism, and multimodal cognition. Proud of the team and the stimulating discussions!

📣The chapter "𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆: 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀" w/@mariannabolog.bsky.social is now online & forthcoming in the #ElsevierEncyclopedia of Language & Linguistics 🔍 Theoretical overview, quantification tools, and behavioral evidence on specificity. 👉 Read: urly.it/31c4nm @abstractionerc.bsky.social

The dataset includes over 240K fixations and 150K word-level metrics, with saccade, fixation, and (word) interest area reports. Preprint osf.io/preprints/os..., data osf.io/hx2sj/. Work conducted with @davidecrepaldi.bsky.social and Maria Ktori. (2/2)

How can we reduce conceptual clutter in the psychological sciences? @ruimata.bsky.social and I propose a solution based on a fine-tuned 🤖 LLM (bit.ly/mpnet-pers) and test it for 🎭 personality psychology. The paper is finally out in @natrevpsych.bsky.social: go.nature.com/4bEaaja

For those who couldn't attend, the recording of Abhilasha Kumar's seminar on exploring form-meaning interactions in novel word learning and memory search is now available on our YouTube channel!! Watch the full presentation here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJTs...

Happy to share that our work on semantic composition is out now -- open access -- in Cerebral Cortex! With Marco Marelli (@ercbravenewword.bsky.social), @wwgraves.bsky.social & @carloreve.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

Great presentation by @fabiomarson.bsky.social last Saturday at #AMLAP2025! He shared his latest research using EEG to study how we integrate novel semantic representations, “linguistic chimeras”, from context. Congratulations on a fascinating talk!

For those who couldn't attend, the recording of Prof. Harald Baayen's seminar on morphological productivity and the Discriminative Lexicon Model is now available on our YouTube channel. Watch the full presentation here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN7G...

New seminar announcement! Exploring form-meaning interactions in novel word learning and memory search Abhilasha Kumar (Assistant Professor, Bowdoin College) A fantastic opportunity to delve into how we learn new words and retrieve them from memory. 💻 Join remotely: meet.google.com/pay-qcpv-sbf

📢 Upcoming Seminar! A computational approach to morphological productivity using the Discriminative Lexicon Model Professor Harald Baayen (University of Tübingen, Germany) 🗓️ September 8, 2025 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM 📍 UniMiB, Room U6-01C, Milan 🔗 Join remotely: meet.google.com/dkj-kzmw-vzt

I’d like to share some slides and code for a “Memory Model 101 workshop” I gave recently, which has some minimal examples to illustrate the Rumelhart network & catastrophic interference :) slides: shorturl.at/q2iKq code (with colab support!): github.com/qihongl/demo...

🎉We're thrilled to welcome Jing Chen, PhD to our team! She investigates how meanings are encoded and evolve, combining linguistic and computational approaches. Her work spans diachronic modeling of lexical change in Mandarin and semantic transparency in LLMs. 🔗 research.polyu.edu.hk/en/publicati...

📢 New paper out! We show that auditory iconicity is not marginal in English: word sounds often resemble real-world sounds. Using neural networks and sound similarity measures, we crack the myth of arbitrariness. Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.3... @andreadevarda.bsky.social

1/n Happy to share a new paper with Calogero Zarbo & Marco Marelli! How well do LLMs represent the implicit meaning of familiar and novel compounds? How do they compare with simpler distributional semantics models (DSMs; i.e., word embeddings)? doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

1st post here! Excited to share this work with Marelli & @kathyrastle.bsky.social. We've found readers "routinely" combine constituent meanings for Chinese compound meaning, despite variability in constituent meaning and word structure, even when they're not asked to. See threads👇 for more details:

📢 Upcoming Seminar Words are weird? On the role of lexical ambiguity in language 🗣 Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Why is language so ambiguous? Discover how ambiguity balances cognitive simplicity and communicative complexity through large-scale studies. 📍 UniMiB, Room U6-01C, Milan

⚠️ New Study Alert ⚠️ Humans can falsely recognize meaningless pseudowords when they resemble studied words. 🧠✨ This research shows that our brains detect hidden patterns, even without prior knowledge, leading to false memories. 🔗 Read more: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

📢 Upcoming Seminar The Power of Words: The contribution of co-occurrence regularities of word use to the development of semantic organization 🗣 Olivera Savic (BCBL) How do children grasp deeper word connections beyond simple meanings? Discover how word co-occurrence shapes semantic development

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony.” Explore the article here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... For more trending articles, visit ow.ly/Me2U50SkLRZ.

Our @RBonandrini was bestowed a "Giovani talenti" award for his studies on word processing. Congrats Rolando for this achievement! https://x.com/unimib/status/1870046485947265302

🎤 Just presented at #AMLaP2024! "Be the wapple of my eye: Predicting the sensorimotor pattern of novel words from language-based representations" by @giulialoca_, Simona Amenta & @MarelliMar. 📈 The presentation was very well received. Thanks for the incredible feedback!

Can a word like "quocky" actually hold meaning, even if it’s not in the dictionary? 🚀 Our Lab's new paper shows people might be better at defining these made-up words than you'd think, highlighting the surprising flexibility of language. #AI #Linguistics #LanguageModels​.👇👇

New BraveNewWord paper! https://x.com/CognitionJourn/status/1817927823513825507

New seminar by @ERCbravenewword on July 15th at 2:00 PM! Link to join: https://meet.google.com/hyr-habw-vnj

Over the past weekend at the International Word Processing Conference, we presented our findings on how adults process novel words, integrating psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. @ERCbravenewword (@MarelliMar, @RBonandrini, Iva Saban, @fabio_marson, @giulialoca_)

Verb endings affect our mental timeline (past/right-hand, future/left-hand) with both tensed verbs and pseudo-verbs. Subtle cues shape temporal perception automatically, showing sublexical strings carry crucial semantic info in spatial-temporal associations. #CognitiveScience 👇

Is semantic knowledge automatically extracted from nonwords? Do individual differences in language experience affect sensitivity to semantics? We analyzed data from 300k participants to answer these questions. On 6th July @fabio_marson will talk about these topics in WoProc2024.

The human mind doesn't operate within specific domains. @marcel_binz discusses how a unified model of the human mind can be developed using a large language model, unlocking new hypotheses on human information processing. Thursday, June 20 · 2:00 PM (Rome) Link in the comments

New addition to the lab!

Come work with us! https://x.com/MarelliMar/status/1772220453525848501

🗓️ Join us for our very first seminar! 16 January 2024, at 3:00 PM (GMT), @victor_kuperman from McMaster University discusses 'Personal Narratives by Older Adults Before & Throughout the Pandemic.' 🗣️#CoSoWELL #PsychologyEvent 👇👇 https://meet.google.com/iwd-fdcu-tvb

🚀 Exciting research alert! Exploring how we acquire new words and meanings in the ERC-funded project #BraveNewWord. As adults, we acquire new meanings daily, but how does language reliably help us do so? 🤔 #CognitiveResearch #Psycholinguistic 🧠💡