Francesca Foppolo is Associate Professor in Linguistics in the Department of Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she also teaches Psycholinguistics and Applied Psycholinguistics.
Her research focuses on the processing of syntactic ambiguity and on the experimental investigation of the semantic/pragmatic interface in typically and atypically developing children, bilinguals, and adults. She employs off-line and on-line techniques, with a particular focus on eye-movement recordings during the on-line processing of linguistic ambiguity in the visual context and in reading. She investigates different aspects of language: the processing of morphological cues (such as gender/number agreement features on articles and verbs); syntactic complexity and syntactic ambiguity, and the use of parsing heuristics in processing; semantic and pragmatic features of conversations (such as inferred and presupposed content).
She actively collaborates with some of her colleagues in the Department of Psychology and with other researchers in Europe and US, in particular: Caterina Donati (LLF, Université Paris Cité), Adrian Staub (UMass at Amherst), Luisa Meroni (Utrecht University). She is currently the coordinator of two projects on gender inclusive language: the project titled “Gender bias in language: testing INClusive ITAlian language feasibility and impact (INCITƏ)”, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR, PRIN 2022); and the project titled “Reducing gender inequalities through language: efficacy and feasibility of Italian gender-inclusive language”, funded by Fondazione Cariplo (Inequalities research 2022).
She is a member of the Board of Directors of the international network Bilingualism Matters and a member of the Italian branch Bilingualism Matters@Bicocca. She was also part of the project Multilingualmind. She is associate editor of Applied Psycholinguistics.
