Guest Speakers

Dr. Simona Amenta works at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. Her main line of research is aimed at quantifying and modelling the relationship between word form and conceptual representation, adopting a multidisciplinary approach that brings together theories and methods from experimental psychology, cognitive linguistics, and computational modelling. She developed this line of research during a previous post-doc at the University of Milano-Bicocca, and later while working at Ghent University (Belgium) in the frame of an FWO grant. More recently, she has been working on extending the study of form-meaning mapping to novel derivations, investigating the role of linguistic experience in exploiting this mechanism.

Dr. Amenta will deliver a talk on "The Orthographic-Semantic-Consistency measure".

Prof. Brown will host the "state-of-the-art" session, "Machine learning methods to quantify Orthography-Semantic consistency".

Dr. Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado is a neuro/psycholinguist, working on morphological processing in Tagalog. Using behavioural and neurophysiological methods (EEG, MEG), he explores questions like: How are complex words encoded in the human mind and brain -- as constituents or as whole words? What information does the human mind/brain use during this early, form-based decomposition process? He completed his PhD at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). He has also been working as a doctoral research associate for an ESRC-funded project titled Systematicity and Variation in Word Structure Processing Across Languages: A Neuro-Typology Approach (SAVANT), which investigates the neurobiological bases of morphosyntactic and morphosemantic processing in understudied languages. He has recently joined the Royal Holloway, University of London, as a British Academy Postdoc Fellow.

Dr. Cayado will deliver the talk, "What can morphological processing theories learn from Tagalog morphology?".

Dr. Crepaldi will deliver a talk on "Words as areas covered in the semantic space".

Dr. Katrina Dulay is a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology at City, University of London, focusing on children's language and literacy development and the home learning environments and interventions that support this. She is especially interested in children growing up in socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and multilingual contexts, most especially in her home country, the Philippines. 

Dr. Dulay will deliver a talk on "Creating corpora in under-studied languages: Insights from Tagalog and Kannada".

Prof. Dušica Filipović Đurđević is Full Professor at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Belgrade (2007) and continued her education during visits to The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (2006) and the University of Oxford (2008). She conducts her research in the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Prof. Filipović Đurđević is trying to understand how language relates to learning and memory by focusing simultaneously on intra-linguistic distributional information and the links between language and perceptual experience.

Prof. Filipović Đurđević will host the "state-of-the-art" session, "Vector-Space Models" (Part 1).

Since December 2021, Dr. Fritz Günther has been a Junior Research Group leader at the Humboldt-University zu Berlin, Department of Psychology, Computational Modelling group. His group project on labelling choices (which names do we pick for objects?), word formation (which new words do we create?), and framing effects of labels (does it matter if one calls the exact same thing by different names?) is currently funded by a multi-year Emmy-Noether-Grant by the German Research Foundation. In his previous positions as a PhD student in Tübingen and Trento (2013–2017) and as a postdoc in Tübingen and Milano (2017–2021), he worked mainly on (distributional) models of semantic memory, with a focus on conceptual combination, the process by which we can combine two concepts into a single (new) one, but also on questions regarding the grounding of concepts in sensorimotor experience and the interplay between vision and language.

Dr. Günther will host the "state-of-the-art" session, "Vector-Space Models" (Part 2).

Prof. Marco Marelli is a full professor of General Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy. His work focuses on the psychology of memory and language, and in particular on semantic models and the interface between language, sensorimotor experience and semantic memory. He is currently PI of BraveNewWord, an ERC-funded project aimed at investigating the semantic side of novel word processing in adult speakers. 

Prof. Marelli will deliver a talk on semantic activation in the processing of unfamiliar words.

Dr. Olivera Savic is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain & Language (BCBL, Spain) and a Visiting Professor at the Ohio State University (OSU, US). Her main research interest is understanding learning mechanisms that drive early language and memory development. She studies how this development can be fostered by regularities in language and regularities in visual input from infancy to school age. 

Dr. Savic will deliver a talk on "Semantic organisation from a behavioural-developmental perspective".