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 be held at the Department of Philosophy and Communication, via Azzo Gardino 23.

The schedule will be published ad soon as possible.

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:

• Armstrong, P.B. (2019). Neuroscience, Narrative and Narratology. Poetics Today, 40(3), 395-428. DOI 10.1215/03335372-7558052
• Benau, E.M., Gregersen, S.C., Siakaluk, P.D.,O’Hare, A.J., Johnson, E.K., & Atchley, R.A. (2017). Sweet-cheeks vs. pea-brain: embodiment, valence, and task all influence the emotional salience of language, Cognition and Emotion, DOI:10.1080/02699931.2017.1342602
• Cuccio, V., Gallese, V. (2018). A Peircean account of concepts: grounding abstraction in phylogeny through a comparative neuroscientific perspective. Philosophical Transactions R. Soc. B 373: 20170128.http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0128
• Dove, G. (2016). Three symbol ungrounding problems: Abstract concepts and the future of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bullettin & Review, 23, 1109–1121.DOI 10.3758/s13423-015-0825-4
• Fino, E., Menegatti, M., Avenanti, A., Rubini, M. (2016). Enjoying vs. smiling: Facial muscular activation in response toemotional language. Biological Psychology, 118, 126–135.
• Gallese, V., Cuccio, V. (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
• Glenberg, A.M. (2011). How reading comprehension is embodied and why that matters. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 4(1), 5-18
• Kosmas, P., Ioannou, A., Zaphiris, P. (2018). Implementing embodied learning in the classroom: effects on children’s memory and language skills. Educational Media International. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2018.1547948
• Mathôt, S., Grainger, J., & Strijkers, K. (2017). Pupillary Responses to Words That Convey a Sense of Brightness or Darkness. Psychological Science, 28(8), 1116–1124. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617702699 [https://doi-org.ezproxy.unibo.it/10.1177/0956797617702699]
• Mahon, B.Z. (2014). What is embodied about cognition? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(4), 420-429.
• Mayer, C., Wallner, S., Budde-Spengler, N., Braunert, S., Arndt, P.A., Kiefer, M. (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
• Perlovsky, L.I., Ilin, R. (2013). Mirror neurons, language, and embodied cognition. Neural Networks 41, 15–22. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2013.01.003
• Toumpaniari, K., Loyens, S., Mavilidi, M-F, Paas, F. (2015). Preschool Children's Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning by Embodying Words Through Physical Activity and Gesturing. Educational Psychology Review, 27(3), 445-456. DOI 10. 1007/s 10648-01 5-93 16-4 VQ/
• Tschentscher, N. (2017). Embodied semantics: embodied cognition in neuroscience. German life and letters, 70(4). 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

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 exam will be in written form and students will be asked to answer to 6 open questions (but with limited space) that will cover the topics studied and their applications, and which may require students to design an experiment related to one of the course topics.

The exam test aims to verify:

1. the competence on the acquired contents

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

3. the ownership and congruity of the linguistic expression of the different subjects examined

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

They will be evaluated with marks of excellence:

• the ability to know how to express properly and with appropriate language to the subject matter
• the acquisition by the student 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 articulated in a correct language, but not always appropriate

They will be evaluated with insufficient marks:

• knowledge gaps and / or inappropriate Language
• 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 in experimental sessions for the deepening of experimental paradigms

Office hours

See the website of Luisa Lugli