Leda Berio
My interests mostly revolve around the intersection between cognition, language and culture: in particular, I am interested in how acquiring language shapes our cognitive tools to navigate the social world and in how culture and social interaction bring upon the cognitive changes that make us uniquely human. This includes investigating mechanisms at play in social cognition as well as looking at how our concepts related social groups (e.g. gender, race) come about. I am also a collaborator to the project “The Communicative Mind” at the University of Warwick (UK), and I co-coordinate, with Daniel James, the project “Race: negotiating a fraught German term” based at HHU.
In my PhD thesis I have formulated on account of how language acquisition boosts our false belief reasoning skills. I am currently working on an expansion of this work in my own postdoc project, focusing on the role of schemata and linguistic input in social cognition.
My work in collaboration with “The Communicative Mind” focuses on the role of culture on cognition. In particular, Richard Moore and I are working on a series of papers on enculturation studies and their potential to contribute to the debate on the impact of human culture on cognitive skills.
With Daniel James, I co-manage the project “Race and Rasse: negotiating a fraught German word”, funded by the Bürgeruniversität. Ours is a conceptual engineering project, designed with Benedict Kenyah-Damptey, on the use of the term "race" and on race-talk in the German socio-political landscape.
With my PhD supervisor Prof. Gottfried Vosgerau, I have worked on modelling conversation and on how participants do a good-enough job at understanding each other. Our joint paper investigates the mechanisms at play when establishing Common Ground with other speakers. I collaborate on a series of linguistics topics, including plurals and mass-count shifts, with Kurt Erbach.
Publications
- 2020 Berio, L. “Culturally embedded schemata for false belief reasoning”, Synthese Special Issue: The cultural evolution of human social cognition, ed. by R. Moore, doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02655-7
- 2020 Berio, L. and Vosgerau, G. “Enriching the cognitive account of Com- mon Ground:kinds of shared information and cognitive processes”, Grazer PhilosophischenStudien, 97(3), doi.org/10.1163/18756735-000105, 495-527
- 2020. Berio, L. “Language relativity and flexibility of mental representations: color terms in a frame based analysis”, in Concepts, Frames and Cascades in Semantics, Cognition and Ontology, Springer forthcoming.
- 2019 Erbach, K. and Berio, L. “Readings of Plurals and Common Ground”. In E. Pacuit and J. Sikos (eds). At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information. Lecture notes in Computer Science, vol. 11667. pp. 21-41. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
- 2017. Berio, L. ,Latrouite, A., Van Valin, R. and Vosgerau, G. “Immediate and General Common Ground”, Modeling and Using Context: 10th International Interdisciplinary Conference, CONTEXT2017, Paris, P. Brezillon, R. Turner, C. Penco (eds), Springer, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
Education
- PhD project: Talkinging about thinking: the relation between language and thought and mentalizing as a case study
- 2015. MA, Philosophical Sciences
Università degli Studi di Milano
Milan, Italy
Thesis: "Tackling Abstract Concepts: Embodied Semantics and the Problem of Abstract Meaning"
Supervisors: Corrado Sinigaglia (University o fMilan, Philosophy), Anna Maria Borghi (University of Bologna, Psychology)
Exchange student at King's College London, UK, academic year 2012-2013 - 2013. BA, Philosophy
Università degli Studi di Milano
Milan, Italy
Thesis: Analycity’s Dogma in Quine’s critique to Neo-empiricism
Talks
| 2019 March | Berio, L., “Language Learning and Explicit False Belief Task: An Associationist Account of the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis” SSPP (Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology), Cincinnati, USA |
| 2019 February | Berio, L., “Language giving the higher ground: linguistic knowledge as acquired schemata for understanding others”, iCog Interdisciplinary Approaches to Higher Cognitive Functions annual meeting, University of Reading, UK |
| 2018 December | Berio, L. “Filosofia e Neuroscienza” (Philosophy and Neuroscience, service talk). Scientific High School Spezia, Domodossola, Italy |
| 2018 September | Berio, L., Schuster, A. “: Mental representations in dialogue:explaining (mis)communication with mentalized frames”, Meeting of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology, Rijeka, Croatia. Poster presentation |
| 2018 September | Berio, L. “Mental terms acquisition, negation, and conceptual development”, KogWis (Cognitive Science Annual Meeting), Darmstadt, Germany. Talk |
| 2018 July | Berio, L. “Mental terms acquisition and conceptual development”, Meeting of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology, Ann Arbor (MI), USA. Poster presentation |
| 2018 February | Berio, L. and Schuster, A., “Meaning coordination with mentalized frames”, 19th Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics, Szlarska Poreba, Poland. Poster Presentation |
| 2017 | Berio, L. And Schuster, A "Mentalised Evolutionary Prototypes", Bochum PLM4, Conference, Germany |
| 2017 | Berio L, Latrouite A, Van Valin R, Vosgerau G. , "Immediate and General Common Ground", Paris Context2017 Conference, France |
| 2017 | Berio, L. and Schuster, A. "Mentalised Prototypes, Roots of Pragmasemantics Workshop", Szklarska Poręba, Poland |
| 2016 | Berio, L. "Analysing the Problem of the Influence of Language on Thought", Cost2016, Conference. Düsseldorf, Germany |
| 2016 | Berio, L. "Embodied Semantics and the Problem of Abstract Concepts", MODELACT Conference, Rome, Italy |