Brief professional biography
I obtained my first degree in Argentina, where I studied Linguistics. In 1999, I graduated from Brown University in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. After 4 years postdoctoral research on language processing and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin (USA), I moved to a lectureship at the University of Sussex (UK) before joining the University of York (UK) in 2005.
Research Interests
I am interested in how the meaning of verbs and sentences are processed in real time, how this meaning relates to other cognitive representations such as visual scene perception, and how these processes and representations are instantiated in the brain. Specifically, I am interested in how we map representations of events in the world into sentence structure during speech production and how languages differ in performing this mapping. Different languages impose different constraints on how we can express thoughts.
Similarly, I am interested in the process of mapping words and sentences into representations of events in comprehension processes, with specific reference to particular kinds of events and temporal relations between them. I used a variety of techniques to investigate these issues, including eye-tracking, word-by-word reading, and more recently, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Mapping words and sentences into representations of events in the world is an outstanding achievement of the human brain that enables the communication of complex thoughts and permeates all our social interactions. Understanding how the brain performs this mapping in both language production and comprehension is important to understand our linguistic abilities, as well as their disruptions in linguistically impaired children and brain damaged adults.
Research group
Collaborators and students working on these and related issues can be found at the Psycholinguistics Research Group - University of York