Maria Piñango

PhD, Brandeis University (1999)

Specialization

Neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science.

Research Interests

I am interested in how the process of integration of different linguistic information during comprehension in real-time occurs (focusing on the integration of semantic and syntactic information), and whether differences in the process of integration (i.e., differences in time-course of activation) find parallels in cortical realization and distribution. I am interested as well in the characterization of language deficits that result from brain damage, and in the interaction between linguistic processes and other cognitive capacities such as memory.

To this end, I use evidence from language deficits (aphasia), real-time processing and imaging techniques (in particular fMRI). The phenomena I focus on fall roughly within the confines of the syntax-lexico-semantic connection (both from the representational and processing perspective). This includes the characterization of the correspondence between argument structure and syntactic representation, establishing the connection in processing terms between the lexicon and syntactic representation, and determining the time-course of activation of syntactically opaque semantic combinatorial operations.