Barbara Cassone

cassoneBarbara Cassone is a PhD student in Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Tettamanti.

She graduated in Cognitive Neuroscience at CIMeC, University of Trento, discussing an experimental thesis about the neural substrates of the subliminal processing of concrete and abstract concepts. She then worked for two years as a research assistant at CIMeC, under the supervision of Prof. Jorge Jovicich, focusing on the analysis of functional magnetic resonance data in healthy subjects and patients with glioma.

Her PhD research aims at investigating the nature of semantic representations and the neural mechanisms devoted to the processing of concrete and figurative sentences, by using neuroimaging techniques.

Upcoming Events

September 17, 2024
  • BIL Seminar: Margreet Vogelzang September 17, 2024 @ 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Aula 3143 U6 Bicocca

    Introducing the concept of (bilingual) reference profiles: A cluster-analysis approach

    Empirical studies on bilingual children’s reference production have often focussed on comparisons with monolingual peers. In this talk, I will introduce the concept of “reference profiles”: Speakers may exhibit similar or different behaviours in reference production, independently of whether they belong to a specific group (e.g., monolinguals or bilinguals) or whether their production adheres to some norm.
    As an empirical example, I will present data from thirty-seven Greek-Italian bilingual children (Mage = 9;4, range 7;10-11;6) who performed narrative retelling tasks in both of their languages, as well as vocabulary tasks and various cognitive tasks. The data show that the children had a good mastery of reference (i.e. appropriately using null pronouns, full pronouns, or full nouns) in both of their languages. Using cluster analyses, two distinct reference profiles were identified. Further investigation showed that these profiles differed in both their sustained attention and in the use of overspecified REs in contexts where reference to the same referent was maintained. These results are interpreted in light of current cognitive theories of (bilingual) reference processing and emphasise the potential of (reference) profiles for the study of other domains beyond bilingual reference production.

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