My scientific interests are primarily in the area of Clinical Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). A common thread in my research is the application of computational and statistical techniques to describe how the brain processes language, focusing on constants and factors that enables humans to comprehend and produce linguistic signs.
My main research areas are:
- Pragmatics/phonology interface: the relation between contextual/perceptual evidence of Information Structure phenomena (IS) inside utterances and the automatic measurement of acoustic prominence.
- Semantics/pragmatics interface: cognitive and linguistic variation of action verbs.
- Digital Linguistic Biomarkers: Automatic identification of Mild Cognitive Impairment/Dementia, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Anorexia Nervosa.
- Atypical development of language in children: gestural, pragmatic and narrative aspects of speech productions in preschooler;
- psycholinguistic processing of grammatical gender.
These research experiences are unified by the adoption of a linguistically oriented scientific approach, which, when necessary, has been extended to develop computational, statistical, and neuropsycholinguistic methods of investigation.
