Simona Amenta

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Psychology

The productive use of morphological information is considered one of the possible ways in which speakers of a language understand and learn unknown words. In the present study we investigate if, and how, also adult L2 learners exploit morphological information to process unknown words by analyzing the impact of language proficiency in the processin...

Despite being largely spoken and studied by language and cognitive scientists, Italian lacks large resources of language processing data. The Italian Crowdsourcing Project (ICP) is a dataset of word recognition times and accuracy including responses to 130,465 words, which makes it the largest dataset of its kind item-wise. The data were collected...

Here we explore whether ChatGPT can provide definitions for novel derived words, and to what extent it is able to capture their degree of perceived meaningfulness, as estimated by human speakers. Whereas the produced definitions are largely sensible, ChatGPT predictions about meaningfulness do not align well with the human ones: not only ChatGPT is...

LLM-based chatbots represent a significant milestone as the initial point of interaction between artificial intelligence and the general public. These chatbots offer greater flexibility compared to traditional chatbots, yet their behavior deviates notably from human interaction patterns. Current annotation schemas may not be adequately suited to ca...

Can a LLM understand dialogues, in particular from multi-party settings? In this study we explore this question through the pragmatic framework of Dialogue Acts or Speech Acts. Two tasks - classification and prediction of Dialogue Acts an - are tested with zero and few-shot learning on the STAC multi-party corpus that contains over 13000 EDUs (Ele...

Human language interactions involve complex processes beyond pure information exchange, for example, actions aimed at influencing beliefs and behaviors within a communicative context. In this paper, we propose to investigate the dialogue understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly in multi-party settings, where challeng...

In this study, our objective was to explore the impact of hearing loss on the conceptual system underlying word meaning. We collected perceptual strength norms for 200 Italian words from early deaf individuals with limited or no access to auditory information and compared them to existing norms from hearing individuals. For each word, participants...

The mental time line (MTL) is a spatial continuum on which earlier events are generally associated with the left space and later events with the right space. Accordingly, past- and future-related words receive faster responses with, respectively, the left and the right hand. Yet, it is currently unclear whether the MTL is activated by the whole wor...

The Mental Time Line (MTL) is a spatial on which earlier events are generally associated with the left space and later events with the right space. Accordingly, past- and future-related words receive faster responses with, respectively, the left and the right hand. Yet, it is currently unclear whether the MTL is activated by the whole word or wheth...

We release a database of cloze probability values, predictability ratings, and computational estimates for a sample of 205 English sentences (1726 words), aligned with previously released word-by-word reading time data (both self-paced reading and eye-movement records; Frank et al., Behavior Research Methods , 45 (4), 1182–1190. 2013) and EEG respo...

In the present study, we leveraged computational methods to explore the extent to which, relative to direct access to semantics from orthographic cues, the additional appreciation of morphological cues is advantageous while inducing the meaning of affixed pseudo-words. We re-analyzed data from a study on a lexical decision task for affixed pseudo-w...

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spel...

A key issue in language processing is how we recognize and understand words in sentences. Research on sentence reading indicates that the time we need to read a word depends on how (un)expected it is. Research on single word recognition shows that each word also has its own recognition dynamics based on the relation between its orthographic form an...

We used a large-scale data-driven approach to investigate the role of word form in accessing semantics. By using distributional semantic methods and taking advantage of an ERP lexical decision mega-study, we investigated the exact time dynamic of semantic access from printed words as driven by orthography-semantics consistency (OSC) and phonology-s...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a la...

Research into second language (L2) reading is an exponentially growing field. Yet, it still has a relatively short supply of comparable, ecologically valid data from readers representing a variety of first languages (L1). This article addresses this need by presenting a new data resource called MECO L2 (Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus), a rich be...

Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading beh...

Deaf individuals who learned a spoken language with the aid of a cochlear implant (CI) often experience difficulties with reading. In the present study, we investigate this issue by assessing the impact of lexical and orthographic predictors on visual word recognition in early and late deaf CI-users. Early deaf CI-users were comparable to age-match...

While morphemes are theoretically defined as linguistic units linking form and meaning, semantic effects in morphological processing are not reported consistently in the literature on derived and compound words. The lack of consistency in this line of research has often been attributed to methodological differences between studies or contextual eff...

In human language the mapping between form and meaning is arbitrary, as there is no direct connection between words and the objects that they represent. However, within a given language, it is possible to recognize systematic associations that support productivity and comprehension. In this work, we focus on the consistency between orthographic for...

In language and second language acquisition research, it is important to have a measure for tracking the proficiency level of participants. Lexical competence is fundamental for communicative purposes in a given language, and vocabulary tests are a reliable measure to assess lexical proficiency. That is why vocabulary tests have a central role in l...

Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC) is a measure that quantifies the degree of semantic relatedness between a word and its orthographic relatives. OSC is computed as the frequency-weighted average semantic similarity between the meaning of a given word and the meanings of all the words containing that very same orthographic string, as captured...

In the present study, the role of phonological information in visual word recognition is investigated by adopting a large-scale data-driven approach that exploits a new consistency measure based on distributional semantics methods. A recent study by Marelli, Amenta and Crepaldi (2015) showed that the consistency between an orthographic string and t...

A largely overlooked side effect in most studies of morphological priming is a consistent main effect of semantic transparency across priming conditions. That is, participants are faster at recognizing stems from transparent sets (e.g., farm) in comparison to stems from opaque sets (e.g., fruit), regardless of the preceding primes. This suggests th...

In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way according to the sentence c...

It has been consistently reported that individuals with autism spectrum disorders show a specific deficit in decoding facial expression of emotions. In this chapter we will discuss empirical evidence as well as theoretical hypotheses which addressed the processing of faces in autistic and Asperger children. Although research data are not always con...

A substantial body of literature indicates that, at least at some level of processing, complex words are broken down into their morphemes solely on the basis of their orthographic form (e.g., Rastle, Davis, & New, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11:1090-1098, 2004). Recent evidence has shown that this process might not be obligatory, as indicated b...

Primary objective: The present study explored the behavioural and eye-movement measures in spatial unilateral neglect in response to a bisection task. Research design: Four right neglect patients were considered and compared with 11 control subjects during an online task (segment bisection). Methods and procedures: Eye-movements (fixation coun...

A commentary on Future Morphology? Summary of visual word identification effects draws attention to necessary efforts in understanding morphological processing by Koester, D. (2012). Front. Psychology 3:395.

Background: Previous research has shown that deficits in the domain of emotions strongly characterize alcoholism. Patients diagnosed with alcoholism show impairments in emotional mimic recognition, as well as in the domain of emotional prosody. These data suggest that male alcoholics might suffer from a generalized emotional impairment associated...

The present study explored the effect of different degrees of relevance in discourse com-prehension by using ERPs analysis. A principle of pragmatic relevance is supposed to guide inferential mechanism underlying discourse processing. Discourse level compre-hension needs a system of predictions about which information is more relevant in order to p...

The last 40 years have witnessed a growing interest in the mechanisms underlying the visual identification of complex words. A large amount of experimental data has been amassed, but although a growing number of studies are proposing explicit theoretical models for their data, no comprehensive theory has gained substantial agreement among scholars...

ASD subjects are described as showing particular difficulty in decoding emotional patterns. This paper explored linguistic and conceptual skills in response to emotional stimuli presented as emotional faces, scripts (pictures) and interactive situations (videos). Participants with autism, Asperger syndrome and control participants were shown facial...

This paper considers the cognitive and linguistic processes underlying the comprehension of frozen metaphors, by analyzing both neuropsychological and behavioral data. In order to explore the dichotomy between the pragmatic models (i.e. the metaphor as a semantic anomaly) and the direct comprehension view (the metaphor as a “standard” meaning) on t...

The relation between language and emotions obtained great attention over the last few years. Figurative language is specifically useful to express emotional attitudes or to evoke emotional responses (Gibbs, 1999). Main aim of the present study is to explore, through integrated methodology, emotional attitudes in ironic contexts, which are generally...

Two metaphors coined by Reddy [1], the conduit metaphor and the toolmaker’s paradigm, can be used to introduce several observations on the nature of communication and its pragmatic properties. The conduit metaphor depicts linguistic expression as channels carrying ideas and meanings: mental representations are poured into the conduit and are extrac...

Although frequent in our everyday conversations, irony is a complex pragmatic phenomenon involving specific linguistic, communicative and cognitive abilities in order to be fully understood. In this study we examined the pragmatic comprehension of ironical and non ironical language by analysing event-related potentials (ERPs) of irony decoding proc...

Irony is part of our daily experience, that is probably the reason why a lot of studies have been trying to define its nature and the way we are able to understand the pragmatic intentions lying behind ironic communication. This study addresses the issue of pragmatic comprehension of language by analysing the differences or similarities in processi...

Utilizzando le due metafore cordate da Reddy [1], denominate conduit metaphor e toolmakers paradigm, possiamo introdurre alcune distinzioni circa la natura della comunicazione e delle proprietà pragmatiche che la caratterizzano. Secondo la prima metafora, le espressioni linguistiche utilizzate dai parlanti in interazione sono veicoli all’interno de...

Il presente lavoro di tesi intende approfondire lo studio di fenomeni comunicativi complessi all’interno del paradigma neuropragmatico. Attraverso l’integrazione di misure psicometriche, comportamentali, neuropsicologiche e psicofisiologiche, sono indagati i processi cognitivi ed emotivi alla base della comprensione della comunicazione ironica. Tre...