The Language and Communication Lab focuses primarily on the investigation of speech and multimodal communication. We are interested in studying how the use and interpretation of verbal and non-verbal language in multilingual and multicultural contexts affects communication and is a potential source of misunderstandings and stereotypes. Other research topics include foreign accent and how it affects intelligibility, comprehensibility, and acceptability. We use an interdisciplinary approach and a variety of methods and techniques to study speech and gesture perception and production. The lab resources include testing facilities and state-of-the-art equipment for acoustic and video data analysis.
My research focuses on second-language speech and communication, and is aimed at understanding how foreign accent, L2 prosody, and non-verbal language affect intelligibility in interactions with or between second-language speakers.
My research activity lies within the field of intercultural communication and LSP translation, with particular focus on communication in special languages (LSPs), corpus-based studies, contrastive analysis of English and Italian LSP communication and terminology, and the public communication of science.
My research project focuses on the acquisition of L2 Italian sounds by L1 Mandarin Chinese learners. Specifically, I’m looking at the way in which Chinese learners perceive and produce voiced vs. voiceless stop consonants, singleton vs. geminate consonants, and lateral vs. rhotic consonants in L2 Italian.
My research project is aimed at understanding how meaning is communicated with facial expressions, body posture, gestures, voice variation, and other aspects of non-verbal language in interactions between people of different languages and cultural backgrounds. My focus is on identifying and analyzing non-verbal signals in intercultural communication contexts, and particularly the cues that lead to intercultural communication misunderstandings.
My main areas of interest are interactional sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and the linguistics of migration. I research the ways in which people communicate in changing, complex societies, especially when they have different histories and semiotic repertoires. I am interested in translanguaging in society and education, and my research draws on empirical data gained through ethnographic observations and audio and video recordings of everyday interactions.
My research interests range from Computational Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics to Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics. I am extremely interested in studying language from a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective, adopting a mixed qualitative-quantitative methodology, where quantitative techniques, characterized by their statistical reliability are assisted by the qualitative, close, analysis of linguistic data.
I am currently studying the effectiveness of language simplification in machine-translated emergency communication. In particular, the purpose of my research is to create a set of language simplification rules based on NMT error annotation and on an analysis of the post-editing process, in order to foster the use of machine translation in crisis settings.
Our lab is affiliated to the Dept. of Linguistic and Literary Studies
of the University of Padova.