research interests

My main research interest is in the investigation of the neurobiology of language. I combine psycholinguistic, neuropsychological, and other behavioral methods of investigation with multimodal neuroimaging techniques to understand the neural mechanisms underlying normal and pathological language functions. My research has focused on the neuroanatomical and neurochemical mechanisms subserving grammatical processing, establishing a link between some fundamental syntactic principles, such as hierarchical computational structures, and the brain. A further relevant topic of neurolinguistic research is the investigation of category-specific lexical representations in semantic memory and in verbal tasks. Within this research area, I have carried out a number of research studies on the role of grounded conceptual representations in language comprehension, leading to the discovery of distributed category-specific effective connectivity functional networks and of how these distributed semantic representations are modulated by syntactic polarity properties, such as sentential negation. With respect to pathological language functions, I have collaborated in several studies on the recovery from aphasia in anomic monolingual and bilingual patients. I am also interested in the study of semantic memory, episodic memory, and cognitive reserve in the healthy population and in neurodegenerative disease, such as in dementia.

Current research projects focus on the role of individual cognitive and sensory-motor experience over the life-span in modulating the functional and structural networks involved in the formation of conceptual-semantic knowledge, and on the development of a neurolinguistic grammar of narrative language processing.