Giosuè Baggio
Background and activities
I am principal investigator and senior manager at the Language Acquisition and Language Processing Lab at NTNU. My research addresses computational and neural aspects of human language processing, learning and transmission, with a focus on semantics.
I am author of the books Meaning in the Brain (The MIT Press 2018) and Neurolinguistics (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series 2022) and editor of the theme issue Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 2020).
Before joining NTNU, I have worked at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA). I have studied philosophy, logic and cognitive neuroscience in Pavia, Strasbourg, Amsterdam and Nijmegen.
I teach in the courses Language and Cognition (SPRÅK3300) and Introduction to Neuroscience (NEVR2010).
Scientific, academic and artistic work
Displaying a selection of activities. See all publications in the database
Journal publications
- (2021) Book Review: Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (Eds.), The Science of Meaning. Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics. Oxford University Press. Hardback, pp. 432 + vii. Journal of Logic, Language and Information. vol. 30 (4).
- (2021) Compositionality in a parallel architecture for language processing. Cognitive Science. vol. 45 (5).
- (2021) White matter variability in auditory callosal pathways contributes to variation in the cultural transmission of auditory symbolic systems. Brain Structure and Function. vol. 226.
- (2021) Signaling games and music as a credible signal. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. vol. 44.
- (2021) Network analysis of human brain connectivity reveals neural fingerprints of a compositionality bias in signaling systems. Cerebral Cortex.
- (2021) Theory before the test: How to build high-verisimilitude explanatory theories in psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science. vol. 16 (4).
- (2020) Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater, Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 330. Nordic Journal of Linguistics. vol. 43 (1).
- (2020) Embedding (im)plausible clauses in propositional attitude contexts: Modulatory effects on the N400 and late components. Journal of Neurolinguistics. vol. 53.
- (2020) Meaning composition in minimal phrasal contexts: Distinct ERP effects of intensionality and denotation. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. vol. 35 (10).
- (2020) Kripkeans of the world, unite!. Journal of Semantics. vol. 37 (2).
- (2020) The neural bases of discourse semantic and pragmatic deficits in patients with frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Cortex. vol. 128.
- (2020) Meaning before grammar: A review of ERP experiments on the neurodevelopmental origins of semantic processing. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. vol. 27 (3).
- (2020) Composition decomposed: Distinct neural mechanisms support processing of nouns in modification and predication contexts. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory and Cognition. vol. 46 (11).
- (2020) Theory development requires an epistemological sea change. Psychological Inquiry. vol. 31 (4).
- (2019) Functional connectivity in human auditory networks and the origins of variation in the transmission of musical systems. eLIFE. vol. 8.
- (2019) Modelling meaning composition from formalism to mechanism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences. vol. 375 (1791).
- (2019) Meaning-driven syntactic predictions in a parallel processing architecture: Theory and algorithmic modeling of ERP effects. Neuropsychologia. vol. 131.
- (2019) Language in Our Brain: The Origins of a Uniquely Human Capacity, by Angela D. Friederici. Journal of Language Evolution. vol. 4 (1).
- (2019) Boon or burden? The role of compositional meaning in figurative language processing and acquisition. Journal of Logic, Language and Information. vol. 28 (2).
- (2018) Andrea Moro, A brief history of the verb to be. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 288. Journal of Linguistics. vol. 54 (4).
- (2018) Signaling games and the evolution of structure in language and music: A reply to Ravignani and Verhoef (2018). Artificial Life. vol. 24 (2).
- (2018) From random to regular: Neural constraints on the emergence of isochronous rhythm during cultural transmission. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience. vol. 13 (8).
- (2018) Music evolution in the laboratory: Cultural transmission meets neurophysiology. Frontiers in Neuroscience. vol. 12.
- (2017) Book review: Jakub Szymanik, Quantifiers and Cognition. Logical and Computational Perspectives. Studia Logica: An International Journal for Symbolic Logic. vol. 105 (5).
- (2017) The time-course of sentence meaning composition: N400 effects of the interaction between context-induced and lexically-stored affordances. Frontiers in Psychology. vol. 8.
- (2017) Cultural transmission and evolution of melodic structures in multi-generational signaling games. Artificial Life. vol. 23 (3).
- (2017) Developmental constraints on learning artificial grammars with fixed, flexible and free word order. Frontiers in Psychology. vol. 8.
- (2016) Multiple neural representations of elementary logical connectives. NeuroImage. vol. 135.
- (2016) Formal semantics in the neurology clinic: Atypical understanding of aspectual coercion in ALS patients. Frontiers in Psychology. vol. 7.
- (2016) Language processing is not a race against time. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. vol. 39.
- (2016) Brain potentials predict learning, transmission and modification of an artificial symbolic system. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience. vol. 11 (12).
- (2016) The emergence of word order and morphology in compositional languages via multi-generational signaling games. Journal of Language Evolution. vol. 1 (2).
- (2015) Logic as Marr's computational level: Four case studies. Topics in Cognitive Science. vol. 7 (2).
- (2015) Gamma oscillations as a neural signature of shifting times in narrative language. PLOS ONE. vol. 10 (4).
- (2015) Disrupting morphosyntactic and lexical semantic processing has opposite effects on the sample entropy of neural signals. Brain Research. vol. 1604.
- (2015) Role asymmetry and code transmission in signaling games: An experimental and computational investigation. Cognitive Science. vol. 39 (5).
- (2013) Linguistic representations of motion do not depend on the visual motion system. Psychological Science. vol. 24 (2).
- (2013) Motion words selectively modulate direction discrimination sensitivity for threshold motion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. vol. 7.
- (2012) Selective alignment of brain responses by task demands during semantic processing. Neuropsychologia. vol. 50 (5).
- (2012) Complex dynamics of semantic memory access in reading. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. vol. 9 (67).
- (2012) Phase space methods for the analysis of rapid cortical dynamics underlying human cognition. International Journal of Psychophysiology. vol. 85 (3).
- (2011) The balance between memory and unification in semantics: A dynamic account of the N400. Language and Cognitive Processes. vol. 26 (9).
- (2010) Coercion and compositionality. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. vol. 22 (9).
- (2008) Processing temporal constraints: An ERP study. Language Learning. vol. 58.
- (2008) Computing and recomputing discourse models: An ERP study. Journal of Memory and Language. vol. 59 (1).
- (2007) The processing consequences of the imperfective paradox. Journal of Semantics. vol. 24 (4).
Books
- (2022) Neurolinguistics. MIT Press. 2022. ISBN 9780262543262.
- (2020) Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition. 2020. ISBN 9781782524366.
- (2018) Meaning in the Brain. MIT Press. 2018. ISBN 9780262038126.
Part of book/report
- (2020) Epistemic transfer between linguistics and neuroscience: Problems and prospects. The Philosophy and Science of Language. Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
- (2020) Word structure and word processing in developmental disorders. Word Knowledge and Word Usage: A Cross-disciplinary Guide to the Mental Lexicon.
- (2016) Semantics and cognition. The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics.
- (2012) Language, linguistics and cognition. Philosophy of Linguistics.
- (2012) The processing consequences of compositionality. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality.
- (2009) Semantic unification. The Cognitive Neurosciences, 4th Edition.