Nicoletta Biondo

Research Specialist at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

I investigate the link between language and the brain, combining linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. My goal is to reveal how subtle linguistic differences influence the way we understand and speak one or more languages. I do this by using eye-tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Long bio

After a Master's in Linguistics and Cognitive Studies at the University of Siena, I earned a Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences and Education at the University of Trento, Italy. During my Ph.D., I was hosted by the BCBL (Spain) and the Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst (USA), where I learned how to use eye-tracking to study the comprehension of concord phenomena during sentence reading.

In 2017, I was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Marica De Vincenzi Foundation. Thanks to this grant, I began using EEG to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of different concord relations during native and second language sentence processing at the BCBL. In 2020, I continued my work as a postdoc at the University of Siena, conducting behavioral studies on the comprehension of complex sentences, such as object relative clauses.

This phase of my research career was primarily focused on psycholinguistics and the study of online sentence processing—especially morpho-syntactic/semantic processing—in adult monolingual and bilingual populations with unimpaired language abilities.

In 2021, I was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship, which marked a shift in my research toward language comprehension in adults with language impairment. During this project, carried out between UC Berkeley and the BCBL, I focused on the processing of time in stroke survivors with aphasia.

I recently joined the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF as a Research Specialist. My current work centers on how bilingual abilities are impacted during neurodegeneration, with a broader goal of understanding language processing in populations affected by neurodegenerative diseases.

News

Recently published papers:
- Pracar, A. L., Biondo, N., Dronkers, N. F. & Ivanova, M. V.,(2025). The neuroanatomy of Broca's aphasia. Frontiers in Language Sciences, 4:1496209. LINK
- Biondo, N., Ivanova, M. V., Pracar, A. L., Baldo, J., & Dronkers, N. F. (2024). Mapping sentence comprehension and syntactic complexity: evidence from 131 stroke survivors. Brain Communications, 6(6), fcae379. LINK

My Research Questions

Theoretical linguistics shows that language is highly fine-grained—each word carries layers of information, and words in sentences are linked in complex ways. For example, the Spanish verb reí ("I smiled") conveys that the action happened in the past, was performed by a singular subject, and that the subject is the speaker. Even without an explicit subject, we infer "I" from the verb form—though we still don’t know when the event happened unless a temporal adverb is added.

When I began my Ph.D., I became fascinated by how we process such information. Do these subtle distinctions matter for comprehension? What cognitive mechanisms support them? How are they represented in the brain?

I focused particularly on how we process time in language. Thanks to language, we can talk about events that are not happening in the present moment, and we do that using morphology, syntax, and semantics. Temporal information sits right at the intersection of these components, making it a fascinating phenomenon to study.

I have also studied how we process complex syntactic structures, such as relative clauses. These phenomena offer a window into the remarkable complexity of our language abilities—and into how vulnerable they can be when affected by conditions such as brain injury.

The research questions I have addressed are listed below: