People
Principal Investigator
Prof. Marco Marelli
Principal investigator of the project, unjustifiably proud of the “BraveNewWord” pun. Trying to put together psychology, linguistics, neuroscientific methods and computational approaches to better understand how we use language to structure meaning and make sense of the world around us.
Post-doctoral Researchers
Rolando Bonandrini, PhD
My background is in Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience and Functional Neuroimaging. I am interested in how the brain and its two hemispheres “read” familiar and novel words.
Fabio Marson, PhD
I have a background in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. I am interested in how linguistic experience guides the inference of word meanings using electrophysiological and behavioral techniques.
Iva Saban, PhD
I hold a PhD degree in cognitive psychology and am passionate about understanding how learning modulates our behaviour and shapes the way we process new information.
Oksana Tsaregorodtseva, PhD
I have a background in Cognitive Science and Linguistics. I am interested in how sensorimotor and linguistic experiences shape conceptual representations, with a particular focus on the interaction between language, attention, and working memory.
Marco Ciapparelli, PhD
My background is in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. I combine computational modeling with behavioral and neuroimaging data to study how humans learn, represent, and combine concepts.
Jing Chen, PhD
I hold a PhD in Corpus and Computational Linguistics. My research explores how words encode meaning as reflected in textual data, from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and through the lens of human cognition as well as large language models.
PhD Students
Giulia Loca
I hold a Master’s degree in Language Sciences and I am interested in how new meanings can be induced through form-meaning associations in novel words.
Erasmus Interns
Anlan Wang
I am a summer Erasmus internship student from Keele University, where I am studying for a BSc in Psychology. My interests include cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, and the intersection of computational language models and the neural representation of meaning.
Hasti Davoudi
I am a summer Erasmus intern, completing my BSc psychology at Keele University. I am interested in how we assign meaning to unfamiliar words, and how insights from language models and neuroscience can inform these processes.
Alumni
Andrea de Varda, PhD
I am a postdoc at MIT where I study how models and humans represent meaning in different languages and how language interfaces with higher-level reasoning.
Research Assistants
Andrea Di Masi
I have completed my degree in psychology focusing on Personality Theories, however other fields I am devoted to include; Psycholinguistics, Language processing, and cognition.