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Rosario Tomasello

Substitute Professorship Neuroscience of Language and Pragmatics

 

   Adress: Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin

   Room: JK 31/223

   E-Mail:  Tomasello.r@fu-berlin.de

   Telephone Number: +49 (0)30 838-65588

   Online office hours on Webex, Thursday 11:00-12:00. Please register in advance by e-mail.

Short bio:

From 2014 to 2016, Rosario held a research assistant position in Neurocomputational Modelling of Language Learning for the interdisciplinary BABEL project between Plymouth, Manchester and Berlin universities; 2016-2019, Rosario pursued his PhD at the Brain Language Laboratory (Freie Universität Berlin), which was founded by the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (M&B, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), where he also completed the doctoral M&B program.

For the summer term 2024, Rosario served as a replacement W2-Professor for "Cognitive Modeling“ at the Institute Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. Since 2020, he has held a Lecture position as a replacement for a W3-Professorship for "Neuroscience of Language and Pragmatics“ at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is part of the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity (DFG EXC2025/1) of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, as a research fellow since 2019 and act since 2023 as co-project leader in the subproject “Cutting”. Additionally, he is also part of editorial board at the Cognitive Processing journal of the publisher Springer Nature, for several years.

Research interests

Rosario’s primary research interests encompass two main domains: (i) the neural underpinnings of semantic processing, with a focus on how different word categories (e.g. animal, tool, action) are processed, stored, and acquired in healthy and deprived brains, and (ii) the neural correlates underlying pragmatic information of communicative functions in the context of speech, intonation, and gestures, taking into account social interactions and common ground.

To this end, Rosario coordinates neuroscience experiments (behavioral and electroencephalography EEG) to advance our understanding of the architecture of the language system and its functions in social interactions. He is also responsible for developing precise mathematical brain models of active neural matter capable of processing different aspects of cognition (language, symbols, thought). 

Two key papers: 

Teaching:

Rosario has given seminars and lectures on Introduction to Linguistics, Neuropragmatics, Neurosemantics, Language Evolution, Language Acquisition, Computational modeling, and Language and Brain Research with a particular focus on linguistic, neuroscientific and digital humanities methods, i.e., computer-based simulations of the cortex, EEG, fMRI, TMS, Dialogue Transcriptions, Rating Study etc.

He has taught in both German and English for BA German Philology, BA Educational Science and, MA Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin, the MA/Ph.D. programs of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and BA/MA Linguistics at the University of Vienna. He was also teaching seminars on language evolution and pragmatics as well as on current trends in language and brain research at Osnabrück University for the BA/MA Cognitive Science program. 

Supervision of > 30 BA/MA theses, some of which led to publications

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Publications
Neurosemantics/Computational modelling  
Neuropragmatics

See google scholar for more recent publications.