Biography
Luca Onnis is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo. His interdisciplinary career spans psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science, with academic appointments and research experience across Europe, the United States, and Asia. He holds a BA and MA in Translation Studies from the University of Bologna and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Warwick. He has conducted research at Cornell University, the University of Hawaiʻi, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, and the University of Genoa, and was a visiting scholar at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Before joining the University of Oslo, Onnis held professorial positions in the United States, Singapore, and Italy, founded and directed two research laboratories on language and cognition, directed the Center for Second Language Research at the University of Hawaiʻi, and co-developed and co-directed the Lifespan Research Centre at NTU Singapore. His research has been supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC), the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Singapore National Research Foundation, totalling approximately €6 million. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science.
Curriculum Vitae: Full CV.
Research Interests
Luca Onnis explores the dynamic interplay between language and cognition: how cognitive abilities shape the way we learn and use language, how linguistic experience in turn reshapes cognition, and how our perceptual, social, and linguistic environments influence learning. His research investigates the mechanisms through which learners extract structure from experience, use that knowledge to predict and process language in real time, and adapt their representations as experience accumulates. Recent interests ask how language becomes grounded in cognition and experience—in perception, action, and social interaction—and how this grounding contributes to the emergence and development of linguistic knowledge. His work brings together statistical learning, computational modelling, experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience to study language acquisition, multilingualism, prediction, and the broader cognitive and social ecology in which language develops.
Lines of Research
1. Discovering Structure in Language
A central strand of Onnis’s research investigates how learners discover linguistic structure from the statistical regularities present in their experience. His work has examined how infants and adults segment speech, acquire lexical and syntactic structure, learn non-adjacent dependencies, and generalise beyond the specific patterns they encounter. This research has also explored how prior linguistic knowledge influences subsequent learning, and how statistical learning may transfer across domains and languages.
Examples include Phonology impacts segmentation in speech processing (Onnis, Monaghan, Richmond & Chater, 2005), Learn locally, act globally: Learning language with variation set cues (Onnis, Waterfall & Edelman, 2008), Language experience changes subsequent learning (Onnis & Thiessen, 2013), and Early developing syntactic knowledge influences sequential statistical learning in infancy (Thiessen, Onnis, Hong & Lee, 2019). More recent work examines whether statistical learning produces abstract transfer of sequential biases and how sensitivity to multiple levels of statistical structure varies across individual learners.
2. Understanding language in real time
Onnis investigates how people anticipate linguistic input and integrate it with information as it unfolds. This work addresses a fundamental question in language processing: to what extent do comprehenders rely on prediction, and how does prediction interact with the integration of incoming information? His research combines theoretical analysis, behavioural experimentation, computational modelling, and emerging neurocognitive approaches to examine prediction across different levels of linguistic structure.
This line includes research on forward- and backward-looking mechanisms in language processing (Is the mind inherently predicting?, Onnis et al., 2022), prediction and retrodiction in the processing of frequent phrases (Onnis & Huettig, 2021), cross-linguistic analyses of sentence-processing models (Delcaro, Onnis & Alhama, 2024), and syntactic adaptation across speakers (Eski & Onnis, 2024). Current work extends these questions to the neural signatures of prediction and integration and to how predictive and integrative processes operate during phrase processing.
3. Grounding Language in Sensory Experience
Onnis’s research also concerns how linguistic knowledge is connected to broader cognitive and perceptual systems. Rather than treating language as an isolated symbolic system, this work asks how linguistic representations are shaped by experience, perception, action, and meaning. Earlier studies investigated perceptual simulations in language and links between bodily states and language processing; more recent research examines how linguistic categories themselves can become grounded through experience.
This programme includes work on perceptual simulations of spatial language, the interaction between hand posture and word-order processing, and the role of orthography–phonology mappings in word recognition. Current research extends the grounding question to grammatical meaning, including the registered report Grounding the arbitrary: Acquired embodiment of grammatical gender (Onnis & Lim, 2026), which asks whether apparently arbitrary linguistic categories can acquire embodied associations through experience.
4. Learning Across Languages
Onnis’s research also examines multilingualism as a natural laboratory for understanding the flexibility of human learning. His work asks how experience with more than one language changes statistical learning, language processing, and the interaction between linguistic and cognitive systems. This perspective treats bilingualism not simply as a property of language users, but as a source of insight into cognitive plasticity and learning mechanisms.
Relevant work includes Improved statistical learning in bilingual adults (Onnis, Chun & Lou-Magnuson, 2018), research on bilingual infants and extra-linguistic modulation of noun bias (Chai et al., 2021), and studies of distributional learning across languages, including work on speech-sound cues in bilingual adults (Goh, Onnis & Styles, 2023). His broader research on second-language reading and orthography–phonology consistency further investigates how linguistic experience shapes the efficiency and organisation of language processing.
5. Language in Social Life
A growing line of research examines language learning as a socially situated process, asking how the structure and quality of learners’ environments influence linguistic development. This work moves beyond the individual learner to consider caregiver communication, social networks, patterns of interaction, and the transmission of linguistic behaviour. It addresses how the language people learn is shaped not only by the statistical structure of linguistic input, but also by who communicates with whom, how often, and within what social environment.
Earlier work examined caregiver communication and gene–environment interactions in language development, as well as the relationship between social network structure and linguistic complexity. Recent and emerging studies investigate how child social networks relate to lexical development and how network structure affects the spread of linguistic behaviour, including Effect of Network Structure on the Spread of Linguistic Behavior (Eski & Onnis, 2026) and The Ecology of Human Vocal Learning: A Child Network Approach (Onnis et al., 2026).
Together, these lines of research form a unified programme centred on a fundamental question: how does language emerge from the interaction between learning mechanisms, cognition, experience, and the environments in which people communicate?
Courses taught
- MULTI4100 – Theoretical Foundations of Multilingualism
- MULTI4120 – Cognitive Aspects of Multilingualism
- MULTI4150 – Project-based Research in Multilingualism
- ILN4950 – Research project semester for Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies
- MULTI4190 – MA thesis group supervision
- MULTI4170 – Multilingualism Specialisation B
- LING4140 – Linguistic Method
- Philosophy of science for PhD students in linguistics
Research collaborations
Active collaborations include the University of California, Merced; Max-Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen; Cornell University; the National Institutes of Education (NIE), Singapore; the University of Genoa, Italy; The University of Nottingham, Malaysia; UCL London and the University of York.
Other projects
My wife and I have two ongoing projects that keep us busy and proud:
Ang, WX, & Onnis, L (2017). The ELISA lifelong project. Life.
Ang, WX, & Onnis, L (2020). The ESTHER lifelong project. Life.