Luca Onnis

• Vanbuckhave, Claire; Eikner, Jakob Scherm; Laeng, Bruno; Onnis, Luca & Mathôt, Sebastiaan (2026). Pupil Size Reflects Trial-Level Variability in Imagery Vividness During Immersive Storytelling but Not (or Hardly) Individual Differences in Trait Imagery. Psychophysiology. ISSN 0048-5772. 63(4). doi: 10.1111/psyp.70298. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Caro, Nina Del; Onnis, Luca & Alhama, Raquel (2024). Predict but Also Integrate: an Analysis of Sentence Processing Models for English and Hindi. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Annual Meeting Conference Proceedings. ISSN 0736-587X. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Eski, Kerime Eylul & Onnis, Luca (2024). Is Syntactic Priming from Multiple Speakers Stronger? Languages. 9(4). doi: 10.3390/languages9040137. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Syntactic priming in dialogue occurs when exposure to a particular syntactic structure implicitly induces a speaker’s subsequent preference for the same syntactic structures in their own speech. Here, we asked whether this priming effect is boosted when individuals are primed by several different speakers as opposed to one. In an initial baseline session involving a picture description task, we assessed adult participants’ production of double object/DO (vs. prepositional/PO) dative and passive (vs. active) transitive structures. Subsequently, participants played a picture description and verification game, in turns, with six other players (confederates). During verification turns, confederates primed participants by using DO and passive utterances. Crucially, participants were primed either by a single confederate (single-speaker priming condition, SSP) or by five confederates (multi-speaker priming condition, MSP). Across conditions, the same priming stimuli were presented in the same order, leaving speaker source/variation as the only different feature. The degree to which participants were primed for the target structures compared to baseline was measured. Results indicated a robust priming effect in both conditions. Nevertheless, the increase in the target structures’ use did not differ significantly between the SSP and MSP conditions, suggesting that speaker variation did not promote stronger priming.

• Goh, Hannah L.; Onnis, Luca & Styles, Suzy J. (2023). Is retroflexion a stable cue for distributional learning for speech sounds across languages? Learning for some bilingual adults, but not generalisable to a wider population in a well powered pre-registered study. PeerJ. 11. doi: 10.7717/peerj.15467. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Bilinguals are widely reported to have certain kinds of cognitive advantages, including language learning advantages. One possible pathway is a language-specific transfer effect, whereby sensitivity to structural regularities in known languages can be brought to to-be-acquired languages that share particular features. Here we tested for transfer of a specific linguistic property, sensitivity to retroflexion as contrastive phonemic feature. We designed a task for bilinguals with homogeneous language exposure (i.e., bilingual in the same languages) and heterogeneous feature representation (i.e., differing levels of proficiency). Hindi and Mandarin Chinese both have retroflexion in phoneme contrasts (Hindi: stop consonants, Mandarin: sibilants). In a preregistered study, we conducted a statistical learning task for the Hindi dental-retroflex stop contrast with a group of early parallel English-Mandarin bilinguals, who varied in their Mandarin understanding levels. We based the target sample size on power analysis of a pilot study with a Bayesian stop-rule after minimum threshold. Contrary to the pilot study ( N = 15), the main study ( N = 50) did not find evidence for a learning effect, nor language-experience variance within the group. This finding suggests that statistical effects for the feature in question may be more fragile than commonly assumed, and may be evident in only a small subsample of the general population (as in our pilot). These stimuli have previously shown learning effects in children, so an additional possibility is that neural commitment to adults’ languages prevents learning of the fine-grained stimulus contrast in question for this adult population.

• Lim, Alfred; O’Brien, Beth & Onnis, Luca (2023). Orthography-phonology consistency in English: Theory- and data-driven measures and their impact on auditory vs. visual word recognition. Behavior Research Methods. ISSN 1554-351X. doi: 10.3758/s13428-023-02094-5. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Abstract Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we investigated their independent and composite effects on human reading behavior using large-scale databases. Study 1 found effects on adults’ naming responses of both feedforward consistency (orthography to phonology) and feedback consistency (phonology to orthography). Study 2 found feedback but no feedforward consistency effects on visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, with the best predictor being a composite measure of consistency across grapheme, rime, OVC, and word-initial letter-phoneme. In Study 3, we explicitly modeled the reading process with forward and backward flow in a bidirectionally connected neural network. The model captured latent dimensions of quasi-regular mapping that explain additional variance in human reading and spelling behavior, compared to the established measures. Together, the results suggest interactive activation between phonological and orthographic word representations. They also validate the role of computational analyses of language to better understand how print maps to sound, and what properties of natural language affect reading complexity.

• Onnis, Luca; Lim, Alfred; Cheung, Shirley & Huettig, Falk (2022). Is the Mind Inherently Predicting? Exploring Forward and Backward Looking in Language Processing. Cognitive Science. ISSN 0364-0213. 46(10). doi: 10.1111/cogs.13201. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Prediction is one characteristic of the human mind. But what does it mean to say the mind is a “prediction machine” and inherently forward looking as is frequently claimed? In natural languages, many contexts are not easily predictable in a forward fashion. In English, for example, many frequent verbs do not carry unique meaning on their own but instead, rely on another word or words that follow them to become meaningful. Upon reading take a the processor often cannot easily predict walk as the next word. But the system can “look back” and integrate walk more easily when it follows take a (e.g., as opposed to *make|get|have a walk). In the present paper, we provide further evidence for the importance of both forward and backward-looking in language processing. In two self-paced reading tasks and an eye-tracking reading task, we found evidence that adult English native speakers’ sensitivity to word forward and backward conditional probability significantly predicted reading times over and above psycholinguistic predictors of reading latencies. We conclude that both forward and backward-looking (prediction and integration) appear to be important characteristics of language processing. Our results thus suggest that it makes just as much sense to call the mind an “integration machine” which is inherently backward ‘looking.’

Se alle arbeider i NVA

• Bogoyavlenskaya, Alexandra; Onnis, Luca & Kartushina, Natalia (2026). Child Social Network and Lexical Development. doi: https:/psychologicalscience.confex.com/psychologicalscience/2026annual/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/61647. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The study investigates the relationship between infants’ social network diversity and lexical development in children aged 18, 24, and 36 months. Using parental reports and direct measure we examine how the diversity of social networks in early childhood influences expressive vocabulary size.

• Bogoyavlenskaya, Alexandra; Onnis, Luca & Kartushina, Natalia (2026). The Ecology of Human Vocal Learning: A Child Network Approach. doi: https:/bcccd.org/final-program.htm#51462abstext. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Vocal learning is a steppingstone in the development of language via the progressive acquisition and mastery of language-specific speech sounds from exposure to ambient speech. Children's language development is significantly influenced by their social environments, yet research primarily emphasizes the role of individual caregivers rather than broader social networks (Goldstein, King & West, 2003; Athari et al., 2021). Variability in a child's social network, such as the number of close relationships and the diversity of speakers, may impact their speech perception and production, hinting at a complex relationship between social interaction and vocal learning (Okocha et al., 2024, Casillas et al., 2020). Current evidence is inconclusive, indicating that while some studies suggest benefits from speaker variability, others show no correlation with language outcomes, highlighting the necessity for further investigations to clarify how diverse social networks contribute to infants' language acquisition (Estes & Lew-Williams, 2015; Bulgarelli & Bergelson, 2023). We hypothesize that individual differences in the social diversity of interactions of 11-month-old infants relate to their maturity of early vocalizations, i.e. proportion of canonical babbling, as measured during naturalistic parent-child play interactions. We thus predict that a larger speaker variability (different unique speakers regularly speaking to the child and in the presence of the child, weighted by their frequency of interactions) should be associated with more mature vocalizations at the same age. We recruit families with monolingual Norwegian infants. Data collection involves online parental interviews about the child's social network and audio recordings of play interactions, with analyses focusing on vocalization types and speaker diversity measured through Shannon's entropy, using mixed-effects regression models to assess the relationship between social network diversity and vocalization maturity. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role of the child social network in the emergence of human speech, and the trajectories of speech development.

• Kartushina, Natalia; Mayor, Julien; White, Michelle Jennifer; Gundersen, Anni Sofie Myrtveit; Onnis, Luca & Hagelund, Silje [Vis alle 9 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2025). Reliability of acoustic measures of infant-directed speech between lab and home environments and play and reading contexts. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2023). Grammatical Gender Effects Are Reflected in Distributional Structure of Language. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2023). Does language word order influence sequential learning and processing? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2023). Family Bilingualism. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2023). Properties of child-directed speech that boost language development. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2023). Language experience biases statistical learning. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Kartushina, Natalia; Onnis, Luca; Rosslund, Audun; Singh, Arun Prakash; White, Michelle Jennifer & Theimann, Ane [Vis alle 14 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2023). Babies and kids - how do they acquire and learn multiple lects? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Tonne, Ingebjørg; Onnis, Luca; Rodina, Yulia; Andersen, Mari J. Wikhaug; Steien, Guri Bordal & Gudmundsen, Jenny [Vis alle 13 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2023). Multilingual/second language acquisition and learning across the lifespan. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca & Lim, Alfred (2023). Grammatical gender effects are reflected in the distributional structure of languages. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca & Lim, Alfred (2023). Grammatical gender is reflected in languages' distributed semantic representations. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2023). Network Approaches to Language: Bridging Mind and Society. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2022). Properties of bilingual child-directed speech in bilingual parents: A study on partial repetitions. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2022). Grammatical gender effects on word embeddings. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2022). Does the word order of languages change sequential learning and processing? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2022). Does the word order of languages change sequential learning and processing? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2022). Does the word order of languages change sequential learning and processing? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Onnis, Luca (2022). Which words are repeated most? Bilingual parents repeat nouns and verbs at different ratios when switching between languages in storybook narrations with preschoolers. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

Se alle arbeider i NVA