30770 - Psycholinguistics (2) (2nd cycle)

Learning outcomes

The learning objective of this course is to understand how cognitive processes interact with language processes. Applications of psycholinguistics in different fields will be examined.

Course contents

Psycholinguistic (2) LM course (30 hours of lessons) must be integrated with the one of Psicolinguistica (1) LM (30 hours of lessons) to obtain 12 cfu.

The applied nature of the course will aim at address the issue of the experimental research on language.

At the beginning of the course the teacher will present the main topic as being representative of the main issues and views that characterize the contemporary research in cognitive psychology on language. Students will be required to read a paper and comment and discuss it in class under the supervision of the professor. Given the nature of the course, the attendance becomes very important for the preparation of the exam.

The aim of the course is to deepen a current topic of debate in the scientific community and to collectively co-construct a critical elaboration of this topic.

Psycholinguistics (2) (LM) (6 CFU) will start on the IV period for a total of 30 hours of lessons.

Readings/Bibliography

The Bibliography differs according to whether the student is attending or not attending, specifically:

- Attending students: In addition to the bibliography required for the Psicolinguistica (1) LM exam, students who have also attended Psicolinguistica (2) LM have to study the paper they presented during the course and 2 other papers to be discussed during the course

- Not attending students: In addition to the bibliography required for the Psicolinguistica (1) LM exam, students who have not attended Psicolinguistica (2) LM must study 5 articles, more specifically:

- the three following articles:

1.  Barsalou, L.W. (2009). Simulation, situated conceptualization, and prediction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, pp. 1281-1289.
2. Caruana F., Borghi, A.M. (2013). Embodied Cognition: A new psychology. Italian Journal of Psychology, XXXV, pp. 23-48.
3.  Mahon, B.Z., Caramazza, A. (2008). A critical look to the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content. Journal of Physiology, 102, pp. 59-70.

- two papers from the following list of papers:

1. Adams (2016). How language is embodied in Bilinguals and Children with Specific Language Impairments. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01209
2. Adornetti et al. (2018). Embodied cognition. e origine del linguaggio: il ruolo cruciale del gesto. Lebenswelt, 13, 43-56
3. Ahlberg et al. (2018). How do German bilingual schoolchildren process German prepositions? A study on language-motor interactions. PLoS ONE 13(3): e0193349. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193349
4. Barca et al. (2020). Overusing the pacifier during infancy sets a footprint on abstract words processing. Journal of Child Language (2020), 47, 1084–1099. doi:10.1017/S0305000920000070
5. Birba et al. (2017). Losing ground: Frontostriatal atrophy disrupts language embodiment in Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 80, 673–687
6. Birdsell (2020). Embodied Learning for Foreign Language Education. Journal of Liberal Arts Development and Practices, 4, 15-25.
7. Bonsignori & Proietti (2019). Emozioni in segni: il caso della LIS. RIFL (2019) SFL: 292-306 DOI: 10.4396/SFL2019ES03
8. Borghi & Riggio (2015). Stable and variable affordances are both automatic and flexible. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9:351. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00351
9. Borghi & Zarcone (2016). Grounding Abstractness: abstract concepts and the activation of the mouth. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:1498. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01498
10. Borghi et al (2017). The Challenge of Abstract Concepts. Psychological Bulletin © 2017 American Psychological Association, 143, 263–292
11. Buccino & Mezzadri (2013). La teoria dell’embodiment e il processo di apprendimento e insegnamento di una lingua. Enthymema, VIII, 5-20.
12. Casado et al (2018). When syntax meets action: Brain potential evidence of overlapping between language and motor sequencing. Cortex, 100, 40-51.
13. Cuccio (2015). Embodied simulation and metaphors. on the role of the body in the interpretation of bodily-based metaphors. Epistemologia XXXVIII, 97-112
14. Davis & Yee (2020). Building semantic memory from embodied and distributional language experience. Cognitive Science, e1555., https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1555
15. de Nooijer et al (2014).Words in action. Using gestures to improve verb learning in primary school children. Gesture 14:1 (2014), 46–69. doi 10.1075/gest.14.1.03noo
16. Dove et al (2020). Words have a weight: language as a source of inner grounding and flexibility in abstract concepts. Psychological Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01438-6
17. Dreyer et al (2015). Is the Motor System Necessary for Processing Action and Abstract Emotion Words? Evidence from Focal Brain Lesions. Frontiers in Psychology, 6:1661. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01661
18. Forgacs (2020).An Electrophysiological Abstractness Effect for Metaphorical Meaning Making. ENEURO, 7, 0052-20.2020 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0052-20.2020
19. Fuhrman et al (2020). The moving learner: Object manipulation in virtual reality improves vocabulary learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 1-12.
20. Gallese & Cuccio (2018). The neural exploitation hypothesis and its implications for an embodied approach to language and cognition: Insights from the study of action verbs processing and motor disorders in Parkinson's disease. Cortex, 100, 215-225.
21. Garcìa-Marco et al (2019). Negation markers inhibit motor routines during typing of manual action verbs. Cognition, 182, 286-293.
22. Ghandhari et al (2020).Different kinds of embodied language: A comparison between Italian and Persian languages. Brain and Cognition, 142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2020.105581
23. Granito et al (2015). Naming a Lego World. The Role of Language in the Acquisition of Abstract Concepts. PLoS ONE 10(1): e0114615. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0114615
24. Guilbeault et al (2019). Color associations in abstract semantic domains. Cognition, 201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104306
25. Harpaintner et al (2018). The Semantic content of abstract concepts: a property listing study of 296 abstact words. frontiers in Psychology, 9:1748. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01748
26. Humphries et al (2019). From action to abstraction: The sensorimotor grounding of metaphor in Parkinson’s disease. Cortex, 121, 362-384.
27. Kogan et al (2020). How words ripple through bilingual hands: Motor-language coupling during L1 and L2 writing. Neuropsychologia, 146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107563
28. Kogan et al (2020). Too late to be grounded? Motor resonance for action words acquired after middle childhood. Brain and Cognition, 138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2019.105509
29. La Rosa & Lo Piccolo (2020). Embodiment Cognition e Reading Body. Riflessioni educative su corpo, lettura, apprendimento. RTH 7 (2020) – ISSN 2284-0184. Sezione Brain Education Cognition
30. Littlemore (2017). On the Role of Embodied Cognition in the Understanding and Use of Metonymy. In B Hampe (ed.), Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
31. Louwerse (2018). Knowing the Meaning of a Word by the Linguistic and Perceptual Company It Keeps. Topics in Cognitive Science, 10, 573–589.
32. Mahon,B.Z. (2014). What is embodied about cognition? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2014.987791
33. Mayer et al (2020). Literacy Training of Kindergarten Children With Pencil, Keyboard or Tablet Stylus: The Influence of the Writing Tool on Reading and Writing Performance at the Letter and Word Level. Frontiers in Psychology, 10:3054. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03054
34. Murgiano & Nardelli (2015). Usi linguistici, strumenti sociali: uno sguardo semiotico su esperienza, linguaggio e percezione. RIFL (2015) 2: 29-41. DOI 10.4396/201512203
35. Odendahl (2020). Embodied Cognition, affects and language comprehension. Theoretical basis and (literary-)didactic perspectives of a physically-emotionally grounded model of understanding. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09684-0
36. Salmazo-Silva et al (2017). Lexical-retrieval and semantic memory in Parkinson’s disease: The question of noun and verb dissociation. Brain and Language, 165, 10-20.
37. Si (2015). A Virtual Space for Children to Meet and Practice Chinese. International Journal of Artificial Intellingence in Education, 25, 271–290. DOI 10.1007/s40593-014-0035-7
38. Tian et al (2020). The role of motor system in action related language comprehension in L1 and L2: An fMRI study. Brain and Language, 201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2019.104714
39. Wang & Chen (2019). Experiencing Sweet Taste Affects Romantic Semantic Processing. Current Psychology, 38, 1131–1139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9877-8
40. Zhou et al (2021). The conceptualization of emotions across cultures: a model based on interoceptive neuroscience. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 125, 314–327

The articles can be found online from the Unibo library portal. To download them remotely from your computer, when you are not connected to the Unibo Wifi network, you need to access via the Unibo proxy service (link: http://www.biblioteche.unibo.it/portale/strumenti/proxy).

Students who have problems finding the article, are invited to contact the professor.
Students who are interested in other specific subjects (for degree thesis or research projects, etc.), are asked to contact the professor.

Teaching methods

Lectures with power point presentations and shared discussion of the articles presented by the students, moderated and integrated by the professor.

During each lecture, specific research studies in the psycholinguistics filed will be presented and discussed

Assessment methods

The final exam will be an oral exam. Please, contact the professor to arrange the date. 

The exam aims at verifying:

1. the competence of the acquired contents

2. the level of assimilation and critical-conceptual elaboration of the proposed contents

3. the ability to orientate between the main lines of interpretation

They will be evaluated with marks of excellence:

• the students' acquisition of an organic vision of the topics addressed in class together with their critical use

They will be evaluated with discrete marks:

• a mnemonic knowledge of the subject,
• a capacity for synthesis and analysis

They will be evaluated with insufficient marks:

• knowledge gaps
• lack of orientation in the bibliographic materials offered during the course

The exam offers a further opportunity for discussion with the teacher, a comparison that the student is invited to look for during the lessons, intervening in person with the request for clarification or with proposals for further information.

Students who have already taken a Psycholinguistic examination may, if they wish, opt for an oral interview in which they will have to present and discuss a paper on a topic covered during the course. In this case students are asked to contact the teacher.

Foreign students who feel more confortable to take the exam in English, are kindly asked to contact the professor in order to arrange the examination procedure.

Teaching tools

Participation (also online) in experimental sessions for the deepening of experimental paradigms

Office hours

See the website of Luisa Lugli