Opening Positions

Positions in the ERC Consolidator Project BraveNewWord. 

The project, led by Marco Marelli at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milano, Italy), aims at investigating the semantic side of novel word processing in adult speakers, with an interdisciplinary approach combining experimental psychology, computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. 

Project description

We learn new words almost on a daily basis: as adults, a new element is introduced in our vocabulary every other day. With new words, we also learn about new objects and ideas – in most cases new words are not simply additional labels to be applied to familiar objects: they connote meanings that are unknown to the speaker of a language. However, when we experience, as adults, an unfamiliar word, typically its referent is not immediately available in the same context. How then can language, by itself, constitute such a reliable instrument for the acquisition of novel meanings? What do we exploit to induce new meanings on the basis of an unfamiliar sequence of sounds or graphical elements?

BraveNewWord addresses these questions combining modelling approaches from computational linguistics and empirical investigation from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. BraveNewWord posits three main sources for lexically-driven meaning acquisition: linguistic context, word morphological structure, general-purpose form-meaning mapping. The project aims at developing a computational framework that models these mechanisms through data-driven, psychologically plausible distributional systems trained on examples of natural language usage. The quantitative characterizations offered by these computational efforts will constitute, in turn, the basis for BraveNewWord large-scale empirical investigation, involving both behavioral (reaction times, mouse-tracking trajectories, diachronic language changes) and neuroscience data (event-related potentials, neuroimaging).

The Department of Psychology at UniMib

The Department of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicocca is extremely young and yet presents a great tradition: established in 1999 as part of a newly-instituted university, its roots lie in the Institute of Psychology of the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Milano, founded by the famous Italian psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti.

The Department combines basic and applied research, building on effective interactions between various disciplines, which all contribute to the knowledge of mind. Today is one of Italy’s most prestigious and high-ranked departments of psychology, as well as being the largest, with its current 79 faculty members, dozens of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, and over 20 research laboratories.

Open positions

A post-doc position will be available in the context of the project, starting in Spring 2025.

The position will focus on the development and fine-tuning of the computational models developed for BraveNewWord (based on distributional semantics), and the application of existing language models for such purpose. Desired skills include experience with programming, computational linguistics and cognitive modelling.

Send me an email for inquiries, information and expressions of interest.