Gabriella Vigliocco

Gabriella Vigliocco is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at University College London, where she conducts research at the intersection of cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience. Her work focuses on psychological and neural mechanisms of human language use, with particular emphasis on how conceptual and linguistic information are integrated.

Her educational background includes:

• Doctor of Philosophy from Universita degli Studi di Trieste (1995)
• Bachelor of Science from Universita degli Studi di Trieste (1990)

Vigliocco's research spans cognitive and computational psychology, linguistics, neurosciences, applied and developmental psychology, biological psychology, and social and personality psychology. Her laboratory has made significant contributions including development of a theoretical framework for sentence production and explicit computational models of lexical semantic representation informed by cognitive science and neuroscience. Current research projects address the relationship between language and thought in spoken and signed languages, and the representation of abstract knowledge.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals a strong focus on multimodal language processing, ecological approaches to cognition, and the integration of linguistic and conceptual information. Her work frequently examines how gesture and speech interact in communication, with particular attention to developmental contexts and language disorders. The research demonstrates interdisciplinary collaboration across psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and computational modeling.

Vigliocco leads the Doctoral Programme for the Ecological Study of the Brain at UCL since October 2018, mentoring the next generation of researchers in this emerging field. Her laboratory maintains active research in language processing, conceptual representation, and multimodal communication, with numerous publications spanning top journals in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.