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: Adrian Staub (UMass at Amherst), Luisa Meroni (Utrecht University), Carla Contemori (University of Texas at El Paso), Rita Manzini (Università di Firenze), Kumiko Fukumura (University of Striling).
She is a member of the advisory board of the international network Bilingualism Matters and a member of the Italian branch Bilingualism Matters@Bicocca and part of the project Multilingualmind.
