Staff Profile of Dr Marco Tamburelli

Name:

Marco Tamburelli

Position:

Lecturer in Bilingualism

Email:

m.tamburelli@bangor.ac.uk

Location:

Room 332, New Arts

Phone:

++44 (0)1248 382078

I joined Bangor University in September 2010, after spending two years at Nottingham Trent University, where I worked as research fellow on a Leverhulme project (2008-2010).

I received my PhD in Linguistics from UCL in 2007 with a thesis entitled The Role of Lexical Acquisition in Simultaneous Bilingualism, a study of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie transfer effects in bilingual children.

The research was partly funded by the AHRC and the Old Students Association, and was supervised by Dr Hans van de Koot and Prof. Neil V. Smith.

During my Ph.D. studies I had the opportunity to teach a number of courses in linguistics and human communication at UCL and at Middlesex University.

After completing my Ph.D. I spent two years at Nottingham Trent University as part of the SLI (Specific Language Impairment) Unit working on a Leverhulme Trust project entitled “Investigating the cognitive deficits that underlie specific language impairment”. The project is run by Dr Gary Jones in collaboration with Professor Julian Pine (University of Liverpool) and Professor Fernand Gobet (Brunel University).

The project focused heavily on the acquisition of phonology in typical and atypical language development, particularly in relation to children's performance in non-word repetition tasks. We looked at the types of repetition error made by the children at different level of analysis, including the word, syllable, and phonemic level.

In addition, I worked on the development of EPAM-VOC, a computational model of vocabulary learning which aims to reproduce the patterns of impairment that are required to simulate the repetition performance of children with SLI.

My Research has a cognitive and a (much smaller...) sociolinguistic strand. Within cognitive linguistics I have worked on Bilingual First Language Acquisition, particularly in relation to syntactic transfer effects in simultaneous bilingualism, but also on the acquisition and organisation of lexical properties, the nature of paradigms and of the mechanisms underlying lexical organisation (including the mapping of cross-modular information in the lexicon) and - more recently - on lexical and phonological development in typically developing children and in children with SLI.
My involvement with cognitive bilingualism and my own bilingual background (Lombard-Italian) have also stirred up an interest in the more social aspects of bilingual development and maintenance, which has recently led me to do some research on minority languages and language policy, particularly with regard to the rights of regional (minority) languages and of diglossic/bilingual communities in Italy.

Recent presentations

(2010) Tamburelli, M., G. Jones, F. Gobet, & J. Pine. "Syllabic error patterns in typically-developing children and children with SLI: Evidence from data and simulations." Oral
presentation at the Child Language Seminar 2010, London, UK.
(2010) Jones, G., M. Tamburelli, F. Gobet, & J. Pine. "Nonword repetition and SLI: Explaining repetition deficits in SLI using data and computational modelling." Poster presentation at the Child Language Seminar 2010, London, UK.
(2010) "From Diglossia to Bilingualism: maintaining Italy's linguistic heritage." Oral presentation at the Quatrièmes Journées des Droits Linguistiques, Teramo, Italy.
(2010) The vanishing languages of Italy: Diglossia, bilingualism, and shift. Keynote address at Languages in Contact 2010, Philological School of Higher Education, Wroclaw, Poland (May 2010).
(2010) Naudé, L., G. Jones, & M. Tamburelli. "Syllabic and phonemic neighbourhoods in nonword repetition." Poster presentation at the Meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society, London, UK.
(2009) Jones, G., S. E. Watson, & M. Tamburelli. "Lexical and non-lexical nonword repetition performance in SLI: An analysis of accuracy and errors." Oral presentation at the BPS Developmental Conference, Nottingham, UK.
(2008) What if there is such a thing as society? A look at the sociolinguistics of language-shift in Gallo-Romance Italy. Presentation given at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory & Practice, Bangor University, Wales. (8 Dec 2008).
(2008) When regional languages go global: A study of minor Italo- and Gallo-Romance languages on the web. Paper presented at Globality, Locality and Contact ? Language and Culture. Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. (17?18 November 2008).
(2008) Modelling the bilingual mind: gains and losses in current theoretical developments. Paper presented at the Workshop on Interdisciplinary approaches to transfer, crosslinguistic influence and contact-induced change. University of the West of England, Bristol. (9-11 July 2008).

Publications

(2011) Tamburelli, M., Jones, G., Gobet, F., & Pine, J. M. Computational modelling of phonological acquisition: Simulating error patterns in nonword repetition tasks (pre-print version). To appear in Language & Cognitive Processes.
(2010) Jones, G., Tamburelli, M., Watson, S. E., Gobet, F., & Pine, J. M. Lexicality and frequency in specific language impairment: Accuracy and error data from two nonword repetition tests. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research,53: 1642-1655.
(2008) Invulnerable Domains in Romance-Germanic Bilingualism. In Arena Romanistica: Didactic Studies in Romance Languages, 1/2008.
(2008) The Role of Paradigm Formation in lexical acquisition: towards a unified account of overgeneralization and transfer effects. Language Acquisition: a Journal of Developmental Linguistics. 15(3): 130-182. [DOI link]
(2008) Lexical Acquisition and Simultaneous Bilingualism. Poster presented at the 10th Child Language Seminar , University of Reading, UK.
(2007) A Lexical Model of Acquisition and its Implications for Simultaneous Bilingualism. In A. Nikolaev (ed.) Two or More Languages: Proceedings from the 9th Nordic Conference on Bilingualism, vol. 41. Joensuu: University of Joensuu, Finland.
(2006) Remarks on Richness. In M. Pearce and R. Breheny (ed.) UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 18.
(2006) Paradigms, Acquisition and Bilingualism. In Proccedings of the Fourth Cambridge Post-Graduate Conference in Language Research
(2005) The Importance of Paradigm Formation in Bilingual Acquisition: evidence from Italian. In M. Pearce and N. Topinzi (ed.) UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 17.
(2004) On The Acquisition of Lexical Properties. Proceedings of the 13th Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics, University of Manchester.

Teaching at Bangor

I teach courses on introductory linguistics, phonology, and bilingualism (from a social as well as a psycholinguistic perspective). For details, please consult the current timetable or send me a message.

QXL1110 - Introduction to Language
QXL1113 - Language and Culture
QXL2201 - Sounds and Sound Systems
QXL33/4404 - Language Contact and Bilingualism