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
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:
Methods for online sentence comprehension assessment
Eye-tracking
Event-Related Potentials
Lesion-Symptom mapping
You can find the most updated version of my CV (and my email address) here: