Rate My Professor Gabriella Vigliocco

Gabriella Vigliocco is Professor of the Psychology of Language in the Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Brain Sciences, at University College London. She received her BS in Experimental Psychology from Università degli Studi di Padova in 1990 and her PhD in Experimental Psychology from Università degli Studi di Trieste in 1995. After postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (1999-2000) before joining UCL. There, she has held key administrative roles, including Head of the Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department (2008-2010), Acting Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences (2010-2011), and Vice Dean of Education (2014-2018). She directs the Language and Cognition Lab, co-directs the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, and leads the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme for the Ecological Study of the Brain since 2018. She also serves as a resident scientist at the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute.

Vigliocco's research explores the cognitive and neurobiological foundations of human communication in naturalistic, multimodal contexts, using psychological, neuroscientific, and computational approaches. Her interests encompass semantic representations grounded in sensorimotor and emotional experiences, iconicity in language processing across spoken and signed modalities, multimodal cues such as gestures and intonation in comprehension and acquisition, and social influences on learning abstract concepts. Major projects include the ECOLANG initiative, supported by an ERC Advanced Grant (2018-2024, €2.25 million) and ESRC funding. She has received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2018) and is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for Psychological Science. Key publications feature 'The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters' (2011, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General), 'Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics' (2012, Cortex), 'Iconicity as a general property of language: evidence from spoken and signed languages' (2010, Frontiers in Psychology), and 'Nouns and verbs in the brain' (2011, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews), amassing over 15,000 citations.