About me

My name is Simone Gastaldon and I'm a cognitive (neurp)scientist focusing on language and speech processing. I hold a Master's in Linguistics and a PhD in Psychological Sciences from the University of Padova, Italy. During my PhD (2017-2020) and post-docs (2020-2025) at the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation (supervisor: Francesca Peressotti) I used behavioral and EEG methods to study language comprehension (especially predictive processing) and language production in both typical and atypical populations (e.g., people who stutter, deaf people with cochlear implant).

In November 2025 I started as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the BCBL - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain; supervisor: Nicola Molinaro) with a secondment at the Donders Centre for Cognition (Nijmegen, The Netherlands; supervisor: Vitória Piai). The project, titled Flexible rhythm production abilities and cortical tracking of speech in the healthy and damaged brain (FlexyRhythm), aims at investigating the relationship between flexible rhythm production abilities (speech-specific anisochronous rhythms), cortical tracking of continuous speech and auditory-motor coupling in healthy and post-stroke individuals, by means of MEG and advanced analytical approaches such as mTRF, phase coherence and mutual entropy.

My research interests span predictive processing in language, auditory-motor interaction, speech-motor impairments, rhythm production, cortical tracking, audiovisual speech, comprehension in adverse listening conditions, typical and atypical language. Recently, I have been developing interests in Open Science and methodological issues in the language sciences, linguistic alignment, acoustic phonetics and voice analysis, brain-body interactions, dog-human communication, and human speech processing in the canine brain.

Things you may not know about me: I have a black and tan shiba inu called Arashi, I listen to extreme and obscure music (I have a representative and looooong playlist here), I sometimes like to paint and draw (have a look here) and taking pictures (have a look here and here), and I'm a plant daddy.