Vittoria Dentella

PhD Programme: Cognitive Science and Language
Research group: ROLLING – Research on Language and Linguistics
Supervisors: Evangelia Leivada & Isabel Oltra-Massuet

Bio

She first studied at the University of Trieste, where she got a BA in Applied Interlinguistic Communication. During her BA, she did an Erasmus in Slovenia and two university stays in Russia, where she deepened the knowledge of the languages she studied. She graduated with a thesis in Italian linguistics on crystallyzed-clitic verbs, supervised by Prof. Stefano Ondelli. After that, realizing that she enjoyed formal approaches to language facts, she got a MA in Linguistics at the University of Padova. There, under the supervision of Prof. Carlo Semenza and Prof. Davide Bertocci, she wrote a thesis in Neurolinguistics, studying the processing of morphological phenomena in a patient with aphasia. She is now a PhD student in Cognitive Science and Language at Rovira y Virgili University, working under the supervision of Prof. Evelina Leivada and Prof. Isabel Oltra-Massuet on aspects of Grammar, grammaticality and acceptability.

Project: Grammar, grammaticality and acceptability

The aim of this project is to investigate the notions of acceptability and grammaticality through running various types of acceptability judgment tasks. Acceptability judgments are a reliable tool in linguistic research that can provide valuable insights into grammar, eventually giving rise to what has been called the evidential base of linguistics. Although acceptability judgments are robust and reliable indicators of one`s perception of her/his linguistic repertoire, human cognition is fallible to processing biases and heuristics of various types. The ways these biases impact acceptability judgments are still to be determined.

Open Access publications

• Leivada, E., Dentella, V., Masullo, C., & Rothman, J. (2022). On trade-offs in bilingualism and moving beyond the Stacking the Deck fallacy. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-6. View full-text
• Masullo, C., Dentella, V., & Leivada, E. (2023). 73% of the observed bilingual (dis)advantageous effects on cognition stem from sociolinguistic factors: A systematic review. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-15. View full-text