Loukia Taxitari


Loukia TaxitariLoukia Taxitari, psycholinguist
Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale - CNR
loukia.taxitari(at)ilc.cnr.it
building B, entrance 21, 1st floor, room 17

I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Computational Linguistics in CNR, Pisa. I am a psycholinguist, specializing in first language acquisition, that is the way humans acquire language, especially at the early stages of this process. I focus on lexical development, how words acquire their reference and how infants use general knowledge about the world to help in this task, but also in the development of grammar, how children put words together and how they combine smaller pieces of language, morphemes, to form words and express different concepts.

I am also especially interested in how language acquisition proceeds in places with peculiar linguistic situations, such as Cyprus, my home country, where the regional dialect, Cypriot Greek, co-exists with the standard language, Modern Greek. During my post-doctoral research at the University of Cyprus, I adapted the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) in Cypriot Greek and collected data from Cypriot toddlers. The data are freely available at the Wordbank website.

In Pisa I am involved in the ReadLet project, for which we are working on the development of a computational tool which aims to evaluate young children’s reading ability and provide detailed reading profiles to educators with each child’s strengths and weaknesses.

I have obtained my BA in Greek Philology at the University of Athens, with a specialization in Linguistics. I then went on to study at the University of Oxford, from where I obtained an M.Phil. in General Linguistics and a D.Phil. from the Oxford Babylab, Department of Experimental Psychology, under the supervision of Prof. Kim Plunkett. My doctoral thesis focused on how lexical development and perceptual categorization interact in the early stages of language development.



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Selected publications
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2022 - Book chapters
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Crepaldi D., Ferro M., Marzi C., Nadalini A., Pirrelli V., and Taxitari L. (2022) “Finger movements and eye movements during adults' silent and oral reading”, Developing language and literacy-Studies in Honor of Dorit Diskin Ravid, ISBN 978-3-030-99890-5, Levie R., Bar On A., Ashkenazi O., Dattner E., and Brandes G. (eds.), published by Springer (Dordrecht, NLD), vol. 23, pp. 443-471.
2021 - Conference papers
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Taxitari L., Cappa C., Ferro M., Marzi C., Nadalini A., and Pirrelli V. (2021) “Using mobile technology for reading assessment”, ISBN 9781728166469, 6th IEEE Congress on Information Science & Technology (IEEE CIST'20), online, 05/06/2021, pp. 1-6.
2021 - Conference contributions
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Marzi C., Taxitari L., Ferro M., Nadalini A., and Pirrelli V. (2021) “Valutare la lettura "in tempo reale": un esempio di integrazione tra linguistica computazionale e linguistica applicata”, FARE LINGUISTICA APPLICATA CON LE DIGITAL HUMANITIES, XXI Congresso Internazionale di AItLA, Bergamo (I), 11-12/02/2021, vol. 2021, pp. 5-5.
2020 - Conference papers
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Marzi C., Rodella A., Nadalini A., Taxitari L., and Pirrelli V. (2020) “Does finger-tracking point to child reading strategies?”, Proceedings of the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, ISSN 1613-0073, Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics 2020, Bologna, 1-3/03/2021, Monti J., Dell'Orletta F., and Tamburini F. (eds.), published by CEUR-WS. org (Aachen, DEU), vol. vol-2769, pp. 1-7.
2020 - Conference contributions
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Pirrelli V., Cappa C., Crepaldi D., Del Pinto V., Ferro M., Giulivi S., Marzi C., Nadalini A., and Taxitari L. (2020) “Tracking the pace of reading with finger movements”, Words in the World International Conference, Montreal (Canada), 16-18/10/2020, 1 page.
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physiology of communication