Gabriella Vigliocco

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Gabriella Vigliocco is an Italian experimental psychologist who studies how people learn, use, and understand language. She combines ideas from psychology, neuroscience, and computer modeling to explore language in the brain.

She is a professor at University College London (UCL) in the Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, where she directs the Language and Cognition Lab and the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme.

In 2018, she received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and in 2024 she was nominated for UCL’s Inclusion Awards for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. She is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for Psychological Science.

Education and early career:
- B.S. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Padua (1990).
- Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Trieste (1995) under Carlo Semenza.
- Fulbright Scholar (1994) studying grammatical encoding in sentence production.
- Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona with Merrill Garrett.
- Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before joining UCL.

At UCL, Vigliocco leads the Language and Cognition Lab, and she has served as co-director of the Deafness, Cognition and Language (DCAL) Research Centre. She was 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). Since 2018 she has directed the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme for the Ecological Study of the Brain. She has also worked as a resident scientist at the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute.

Funding and collaborations:
Vigliocco has received grants from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the European Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council. She is active in Women in Cognitive Science.

Research approach and key ideas:
Her work blends cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling to understand how language is learned and used, emphasizing its embodied nature. Her research shows that semantic knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor experience and emotions, and that language is often learned and used through multimodal communication, including gestures, eye contact, intonation, and facial expressions. She highlights the importance of gesture for language development and how context can be lost when communication isn’t face-to-face.

Some notable findings include that iconicity (where signs or gestures resemble their meanings) helps link words to concepts and supports language processing. For example, studies with both sign and spoken languages show people use iconic gestures to bridge linguistic forms and meanings, and caregivers often use iconic gestures to aid children's learning when objects aren’t present.

Current focus at the Language and Cognition Lab:
Projects explore how language relates to thought and how abstract knowledge is represented in the mind.

Personal note:
Outside work, Vigliocco enjoys time with her son and family, cooking, reading, and attending classical music concerts.