Maria M Pinango

Associate Professor of Linguistics

Research Summary

Pinango's lab works on the neurological underpinnings of the combinatorial mechanisms (morphological, syntactic and semantic) involved in language use and how the output of these mechanisms is linked to the larger conceptual system and to other cognitive systems (e.g., memory system). This research is carried out by means of normal-brain based models and lesion-based models (e.g., focal brain lesions resulting from vascular disease).

The methods used range from strictly behavioral (e.g., judgments, picture-matching tasks), to online methods (e.g., eye-tracking, cross-modal lexical decision) to neuroimaging (fMRI) (Eye-tracking and fMRI are done in collaboration with Dave Brazie at Haskins labs and Todd Constable at the Anlyan center, respectively).