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Liina Pylkkänen is a professor in the fields of Linguistics and Psychology at New York University, where she directs the NYU Neurolinguistics Lab. Her research focuses on the essence of human language, exploring the unbounded combinatory potential of generative systems in syntax and semantics. Pylkkänen aims to characterize the representational processing properties of combinatory systems, specifically investigating the basic computational units that structurally combine. Her significant body of theoretical work addresses the syntax-semantics interface, particularly in the subdomain of grammar concerning the verb phrase. Recently, she has turned her research focus to characterizing the brain mechanisms responsible for semantic combinatorics in language, studying how the brain builds complex meanings from simpler components through intimately intertwined computations that construct complex syntactic structures. An important goal of her laboratory is to understand the neural bases of syntactic structure building and to study complex syntactic and semantic representations that underlie language comprehension, necessitating an understanding of the lower-level processes involved. Her research includes monitoring brain activity through magnetoencephalography (MEG), which provides an excellent combination of temporal and spatial resolution entirely non-invasively.
Open Program in Biomedical Sciences (Vilcek Institute) covers departments like Biochemistry, Pathology, Neuroscience, Microbiology, etc.