Neurolinguist

Rosario Tomasello

How does the human brain acquire meaning and use language to communicate?

I investigate how language, symbols, and communicative functions are instantiated in the human brain, combining linguistic theory, neuroimaging, behavioural experiments, and computational neural models.

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Current Academic Appointments

Visiting Professor

Linguistics

Freie Universität Berlin

Interim Scientific Lead

Brain Language Laboratory

Freie Universität Berlin

Principal Investigator

DFG — Brain Signatures of Communication

University of Potsdam

Latest News

Language and Semantics

How different word categories — animals, tools, actions — are represented, processed and acquired in typical and atypical (e.g. sensory-deprived) brains.

Communication and Pragmatics

How words and sentences are used as a tool for communication conveyed through prosody, gestures and common ground in social interactions, including special populations such as individuals with brain lesions.

Project description

Although communication is one of the primary functions of language, most psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic models have traditionally focused on words and sentences rather than on the communicative actions they are used to perform.

BraiSiCo investigates the neurobiological mechanisms underlying communicative function and speech-act processing. The project asks how rapidly pragmatic information becomes available during language comprehension, whether communicative information is processed only after semantic and grammatical information or emerges early and in parallel with it, and how different types of communicative actions are represented in the human brain.

Combining neurocognitive theories of language and linguistic pragmatics with EEG, behavioural experiments, neuroimaging, and representational approaches, the project investigates the spatial and temporal brain signatures of communicative functions, including assertives, directives, expressives, and commissives.

A central goal is to determine which neural mechanisms are shared across communicative actions and which distinguish individual speech acts, thereby contributing to a neurobiological account of human pragmatic communication.

Key words

Neuropragmatics · Speech acts · Communicative functions · EEG · Neuroimaging · Pragmatics

Selected publications

View full list of publications

Tomasello, R., & Carriere, M. (accepted). Modelling towards a neurobiologically plausible explanation of action semantics: Response to de Zubicaray (2026). Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

Tomasello, R., Shaman, K., Dobler, F. R., & Pulvermüller, F. (2026). How language modulates color perception in a brain-constrained deep neural network. iScience, 29(3).

Tomasello, R. (2026). From neural matter to rapid symbolic learning in brains and artificial neural networks: a brief overview and perspective. Linguistics Vanguard, 12(s1), 173–186.

Tomasello, R., Boux, I. P., & Pulvermüller, F. (2025). Theory of Mind and the brain substrates of direct and indirect communicative action understanding. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 380.

Villani, C., Boux, I. P., Pulvermüller, F., & Tomasello, R. (2025). The time course of speech act recognition conveyed by speech prosody: a gating study. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 40(8), 1065–1084.

Barthel, M., Tomasello, R., & Liu, M. (2024). Conditionals in context: Brain signatures of prediction in discourse processing. Cognition.

Constant, M., Pulvermüller, F., & Tomasello, R. (2023). Brain-constrained neural modeling explains fast mapping of words to meaning. Cerebral Cortex, 33(11), 6872–6890.

Tomasello, R. (2023). Linguistic signs in action: the neuropragmatics of speech acts. Brain & Language, 236, 105203.

Tomasello, R., Grisoni, L., Boux, I., Sammler, D., & Pulvermüller, F. (2022). Instantaneous neural processing of communicative functions conveyed by speech prosody. Cerebral Cortex, 32(21), 4885–4901.

Pulvermüller, F., Tomasello, R., Henningsen-Schomers, M. R., et al. (2021). Biological constraints on neural network models of cognitive function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22, 488–502.

Tomasello, R., Garagnani, M., Wennekers, T., & Pulvermüller, F. (2019). Recruitment of visual cortex for language processing in blind individuals is explained by Hebbian learning. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 3579.

I have taught undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral courses in German and English at Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin School of Mind and Brain), the University of Vienna, and Osnabrück University. My teaching spans theoretical linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational modelling, integrating behavioural and neuroimaging methods (e.g., EEG, fMRI, TMS) along with experimental linguistic investigations (e.g., dialogue analysis, transcriptions).