Dr Chiara Gambi

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Undergraduate education

2005-2008: BA in Humanities (Linguistics), Bologna  University and Collegio Superiore Almae Matris Studiorum, Bologna, Italy

Postgraduate education

2009-2010: MA in  Linguistics, Bologna University, Bologna, Italy

2010-2013:  PhD in Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, U.K. Thesis title: Imagining and anticipating another speaker’s  utterances in joint language tasks. (supervisors: Martin Pickering and  Robert Hartsuiker)

Employment

2013-2014: Post-doc, Saarland University, Psycholinguistics  Group, Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics (with Matt  Crocker)

2014-2017: Post-doc, University of Edinburgh, Department of  Psychology (with Hugh Rabagliati and Martin Pickering)

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Overview

Language is essential to most human activities (e.g., making friends, attending school, managing a team), and the reason it is so important  is that language is the most powerful and flexible way we have to communicate with other people. I am interested in understanding how language works (i.e., what are the underlying cognitive mechanisms), how it is used in conversations between people, and how children become expert language users through learning from the conversations they have with their caregivers.

To find out, I use a range of behavioural and eye-tracking methods. Behaviourally, I have developed a series of joint language tasks, in which people speak at the same time, or finish each other’s sentences. These tasks allow us to study how our speech is influenced by the presence of other people and what they say. In other behavioural work, I study turn-taking, the smooth system by which we normally avoid speaking at the same time, or leaving long silent gaps in conversations.

Eye-tracking (both of speakers and listeners) provides a window into the cognitive mechanisms underlying language, as we can infer a lot about how quickly people understand and what they are about to say by measuring where they are looking. Using eye-tracking, I study how prediction helps children and adults understand others more efficiently, speak more fluently, and take turns more smoothly.

Linguistic prediction is the ability to guess what somebody will say, how they will say it, or when they will stop speaking. Linguistic prediction is a skill that both adult and children appear to possess, although to different degrees. I want to understand how this skill relates to our ability to express thoughts into words (i.e. language production). Moreover, what other functions does prediction serve? Does it help children learn language in the first place? If you can predict, then you can also compare your guesses to what you actually hear, and this process of comparison may help you learn without explicit instruction. If this process underpins language learning, then does it explain all kinds of learning (e.g., both acquiring your first language as a child and adapting to a new accent when you move to a different town?).

Finally, I am also interested in how linguistic prediction relates to prediction in other domains (action and perception), mind-reading, and imitation.

Research topics and related papers

Joint language tasks. Gambi,  C., & Pickering, M.J. (2015). Predicting and imagining language. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 31(1),  60-72.

Gambi,  C. & Pickering, M.J. (2011). A  cognitive architecture for the coordination of utterances. Frontiers in Psychology, 2:275.

Turn-taking in conversation. Corps, R.E., Gambi, C., & Pickering, M.J.  (2017). Coordinating utterances during turn-taking: The role of prediction,  response preparation, and articulation. Discourse  Processes, 55(2), 230-240.

Corps, R. E., Crossley, A., Gambi, C., & Pickering, M. J. (2018). Early preparation during turn-taking: Listeners use content predictions to determine what to say but not when to say it. Cognition, 175, 77-95.

Prediction: theory. Rabagliati, H., Gambi, C., & Pickering, M.  (2015). Learning to predict or predicting to learn?. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31(1),  94-105.

Pickering, M. J., & Gambi, C. (2018). Predicting while comprehending language: a theory and review. Psychological Bulletin, 144(10), 1002-1044.

Prediction: findings. Gambi, C., Pickering, M.J., & Rabagliati, H.  (2016). Beyond  associations: Sensitivity to structure in pre-schoolers’ linguistic  predictions. Cognition, 157, 340-351.

Lindsay, L., Gambi, C., & Rabagliati, H. (2019). Preschoolers optimize the timing of their conversational turns through flexible coordination of language comprehension and production. Psychological science, 30(4), 504-515.

Ito, A., Gambi, C., Pickering, M. J., Fuellenbach, K., & Husband, E. M. (2020). Prediction of phonological and gender information: An event-related potential study in Italian. Neuropsychologia, 136, 107291.

Prediction and imitation. Lelonkiewicz,  J., & Gambi, C. (2016)  Spontaneous adaptation explains why people act faster when being imitated. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(3), 842-848.

External funding

Welsh Crucible Grant: Engineering conversation: A roadmap to the application of control theory to the problem of language generation. (2019-2020; PI, with Fan Zhang, University of South Wales, Co-I); value: £5822

British Academy Small Project Grant (SRG1920/100600): The role of incorrect predictions in children's comprehension of structural alternations (2020-2021; PI; with Katherine Messenger, Warwick, Co-I); value: £9992.

Research group

Cognitive Science
Development and Health Psychology

Research collaborators

Martin Pickering (Edinburgh)
Hugh Rabagliati (Edinburgh)
Jaroslaw Lelonkiewicz (SISSA)
Roland Pfister (Würzburg)
Kate Messenger (Warwick)
Joost Rommers (Aberdeen)

Supervision

Postgraduate research interests

If you are interested in applying for a PhD, or for further information  regarding my postgraduate research, please contact me directly (contact details available on the 'Overview' page), or submit a formal application.

Current students

Francesco Cabiddu (Lead): The role of statistical learning In the early acquisition of syntactic structure.

Kelsey Frewin (co-Supervisor): Development of verb vocabulary.

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Kelsey Frewin

Research student

Past projects

Ruth Corps (co-Supervisor), University of Edinburgh: The role of timing and content predictions in turn-taking.