Papers by Gabriella Vigliocco
Italian Age of Acquisition Norms for a Large Set of Words (ItAoA), 2019
Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the
performance o... more Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the
performance of healthy individuals and patients in a large variety of cognitive tasks.
For this reason, it becomes more and more compelling to collect new AoA norms for a
large set of stimuli in order to allow better control and manipulation of AoA in future
research. An important motivation of the present study is to extend previous Italian
norms by collecting AoA ratings for a much larger range of Italian words for which
concreteness and semantic-affective norms are now available thus ensuring greater
coverage of words varying along these dimensions. In the present study, we collected
AoA ratings for 1,957 Italian content words (adjectives, nouns, and verbs), by asking
healthy adult participants to estimate the age at which they thought they had learned
the word in a Web survey procedure. First, we found high split-half correlation within our
sample, suggesting strong internal reliability. Second, our data indicate that the ratings
collected in this study are as valid and reliable as those collected in previous studies for
Italian across different age populations (adult and children) and other languages. Finally,
we analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other lexical-semantic variables
(e.g., word frequency, imageability, valence, arousal) and showed that these correlations
were generally consistent with the correlations reported in other normative studies for
Italian and other languages. Therefore, our new AoA norms are a valuable source of
information for future research in the Italian language. The full database is available at
the Open Science Framework (osf.io/3trg2).
Syntactic accuracy in sentence production: Gender disagreement in Italian language impaired and unim
Cognition 61 261 298, Dec 1, 1996
This paper reports studies of subject-verb agreement errors with speakers of Spanish and English;... more This paper reports studies of subject-verb agreement errors with speakers of Spanish and English; we used a sentence completion task, first introduced by Bock and Miller (199t). In a series of four experiments, we assessed the role of semantic information carried by the sentential subject in the induction of subject-verb agreement errors. For Spanish speakers, a sentence preamble such as la etiqueta sobre las botellas (the label on the bottles), which is usually interpreted to denote several labels, induced more agreement errors than preambles that normally denote a single entity. This finding replicates previous research with Italian . English speakers, on the other hand, were not sensitive to this semantic dimension, as was found earlier by .
Gender and meaning in word production 1 The role of grammatical gender and semantics in German word production
Semantic errors (eg, saying "arm" when "leg" is intended) are among the most ... more Semantic errors (eg, saying "arm" when "leg" is intended) are among the most common types of slips of the tongue. It is well-known that semantic errors are constrained by the grammatical class of the target word (ie, a noun substitutes for another noun, a verb for another verb, ...
Cognition 112 473 481, Aug 1, 2009
Despite increasing interest in the interface between emotion and cognition, the role of emotion i... more Despite increasing interest in the interface between emotion and cognition, the role of emotion in cognitive tasks is unclear. According to one hypothesis, negative valence is more relevant for survival and is associated with a general slowdown of the processing of stimuli, due to a defense mechanism that freezes activity in the face of threat. According to a different hypothesis which does not posit a privileged role for the aversive system, valence, regardless of polarity, facilitates processing due to the relevance of both negative and positive stimuli for survival and for the attainment of goals. Here, we present evidence that emotional valence has an overall facilitatory role in the processing of verbal stimuli, providing support for the latter hypothesis. We found no asymmetry between negative and positive words and suggest that previous findings of such an asymmetry can be attributed to failure to control for a number of critical lexical variables and to a sampling bias.
The anatomy of meaning and syntax
Current Biology, Feb 1, 2000
Recent brain imaging studies have provided evidence that distinct parts of the left frontal corte... more Recent brain imaging studies have provided evidence that distinct parts of the left frontal cortex are involved in processing the structure (syntax) and meaning (semantics) of a sentence, setting the stage for the development of more precise neuroanatomical models of language processing.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General, Feb 1, 2011
Embodied abstract semantics 2 Abstract Although much is known about the representation and proces... more Embodied abstract semantics 2 Abstract Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, our knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this paper we first address the adequacy of the two dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental findings and that this is, at least partly, because abstract words are considered to be unrelated to experiential information in both of these accounts. We then address one particular type of experiential information, emotional content, and demonstrate that it plays a crucial role in the processing and representation of abstract concepts: statistically, abstract words are more emotionally valenced than concrete words and this accounts for a residual latency advantage for abstract words, when variables such as imageability (a construct derived from dual coding theory) and rated context availability are held constant. We conclude with a discussion of our novel hypothesis for embodied abstract semantics.
Does the grammatical count/mass distinction affect semantic representations? Evidence from experiments in English and Japanese
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2010
... Moreover, in a study on tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomena in English, Vigliocco, Vinson, Mart... more ... Moreover, in a study on tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomena in English, Vigliocco, Vinson, Martin, and Garrett (199950. Vigliocco, G., Vinson, DP, Martin, RC and Garrett, MF 1999. Is 'count' and 'mass' information available when the noun is not? ...
Erratum to “The ERP response to the amount of information conveyed by words in sentences” [Brain and Language 140 (2015) 1–11]
Brain and Language, 2015
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Papers by Gabriella Vigliocco
performance of healthy individuals and patients in a large variety of cognitive tasks.
For this reason, it becomes more and more compelling to collect new AoA norms for a
large set of stimuli in order to allow better control and manipulation of AoA in future
research. An important motivation of the present study is to extend previous Italian
norms by collecting AoA ratings for a much larger range of Italian words for which
concreteness and semantic-affective norms are now available thus ensuring greater
coverage of words varying along these dimensions. In the present study, we collected
AoA ratings for 1,957 Italian content words (adjectives, nouns, and verbs), by asking
healthy adult participants to estimate the age at which they thought they had learned
the word in a Web survey procedure. First, we found high split-half correlation within our
sample, suggesting strong internal reliability. Second, our data indicate that the ratings
collected in this study are as valid and reliable as those collected in previous studies for
Italian across different age populations (adult and children) and other languages. Finally,
we analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other lexical-semantic variables
(e.g., word frequency, imageability, valence, arousal) and showed that these correlations
were generally consistent with the correlations reported in other normative studies for
Italian and other languages. Therefore, our new AoA norms are a valuable source of
information for future research in the Italian language. The full database is available at
the Open Science Framework (osf.io/3trg2).