Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du Doctorat en informatique cognitive, en collaboration avec le centre de recherche CRIA             

TITRE : Situated Multimodal Word Learning

Gabriella VIGLIOCCO

Jeudi le 15 octobre 2026 à 10h30

Local PK-5115 (Il est possible d'y assister en virtuel en vous inscrivant ici)                

RÉSUMÉ

I will discuss similarities and differences between the way people learn about new things in everyday life from caregivers or teachers and the way language models learn. In everyday face-to-face contexts, in addition to the information in the linguistic input, human learners can take advantage of situated information, including the visual communicative signals produced by teachers, the physical availability of what is being talked about (especially if concrete) and, crucially, also the contingency between what the learner and the teacher say and do. Studies show that multimodal communicative signals like gaze and gesture, active engagement in the learning, and the contingency between teacher and learner behaviours all influence learning in a dynamic way across ages (from childhood to adulthood). I will discuss possible cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating these effects and then open the discussion to the challenges and opportunities these findings pose for learning in artificial systems, focusing on both multimodality and social contingency.

BIOGRAPHIE

Gabriella VIGLIOCCO is Professor of Psychology and Language Sciences in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London, where she directs the Language and Cognition Lab. Her research examines how language and cognition are grounded in embodied, multimodal experience — including gesture, iconicity, and sensorimotor and emotional information — and how this shapes word learning, sentence processing, and language development across the lifespan.

RÉFÉRENCES 

Motamedi, Y., Murgiano, M., Grzyb, B., Gu, Y., Kewenig, V., Brieke, R., Donnellan, E., Marshall, C., Wonnacott, E., Perniss, P., & Vigliocco, G. (2024). Language development beyond the here-and-now: Iconicity and displacement in child-directed communication. Child Development, 95(5), 1539–1557.

Murgiano, M., Motamedi, Y., & Vigliocco, G. (2021). Situating Language in the Real-World: The Role of Multimodal Iconicity and Indexicality. Journal of Cognition, 4(1).

Szegedi, D., Rozic, G., Fonagy, P., Hamilton, A., & Vigliocco, G. Learning about ‘Inflation’: Mapping Caregivers’ Mentalizing and Pedagogical Strategies that Support 8-9-year-old Children’s Learning of Abstract Concepts. 

De Felice, S., de C Hamilton, A. F., Ponari, M., & Vigliocco, G. (2022). Learning from others is good, with others is better: the role of social interaction in human acquisition of new knowledge. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 378(1870), 20210357.