Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Psychology
Cognition & Perception, Department
of Linguistics, & Center
for Neuromagnetism
Visit the Neurolinguistics
Lab
Visit my Linguistics
homepage
Teaching
Human language is a discrete combinatorial system of practically limitless
expressive power. In my research I study the mental structures and neural
bases underlying this uniquely human ability. In one line of research,
I investigate the static representations of language, with a focus on elucidating
the syntactic and semantic properties of the basic elements of linguistic
computation. While these elements and their combination can be described
with logic and grammar formalisms, we ultimately want to understand how
language is biologically instantiated in the brain. With this goal in mind,
most of my research effort is nowadays dedicated to uncovering the neural
substrates of linguistic function. Discovery of such neural markers is
a prerequisite for articulating a general functional neuroanatomy of language.
But most importantly, I use neural correlates of linguistic processes as
novel dependent measures to address questions about linguistic representation
that are underdetermined by traditional theoretical and behavioral methods.
As my primary technique to monitor brain activity, I use magnetoencephalography
(MEG), which has the best combination of spatial and temporal resolution
of all existing cognitive neuroscience techniques.
Properties of basic building blocks
While languages like English and Chinese, or Italian and Finnish, seem
to differ from each other so vastly, decades of research in theoretical
linguistics have revealed, and keep revealing, a common core underlying
all languages. My research in theoretical linguistics has focused on
elucidating how the verbal systems of human languages encode events,
states and participant intentionality, both at the universal and language
specific levels. If John rolls the ball, how does language encode the
rolling of the ball, the event that causes it and Johns agentivity?
Focusing on questions such as these, my dissertation, Introducing
arguments (2002), described the verbal systems of a wide range
of languages and proposed a tightly constrained universal system of elements
that form the basic units of verbal derivation and event structure crosslinguistically.
Neural correlate of access to basic building
blocks
Abstracting away from modality specific issues, natural language interpretation
minimally involves activating the basic sound-meaning connections of
language and combining them into complex, interpretable, representations.
Thus a neural theory of language processing needs to minimally explain
the neural bases of lexical access and this combination, or merge,
to use the Chomskian terminology.
I and my colleagues have studied the
electromagnetism of word recognition and lexical access extensively.
Figure 1 illustrates a characteristic MEG response elicited by visual
words. We now have a body of evidence suggesting that access to morphological
roots, or open-class morphemes, is indexed by the M350 response component,
generated by left superior temporal areas. We have shown that the
M350 tracks early, and not late, factors in lexical processing,
and that it can be used to distinguish between representational identity
and mere similarity in a way that behavioral reaction times cannot.
For example, we have established special effects of morphology and polysemy that
can only be seen in the M350.
Fig. 1. MEG evoked response to visually presented words. Magnetic
field maps are plotted on top and dipole solutions in the bottom.
Neural bases of sentence-level semantic interpretation
While I continue to be interested in the M350 and lexical representation,
much of my current research is focused on sentence-level semantic processing.
We have recently reported that sentence-level semantic properties modulate
activity in frontal regions, in the anterior midline field (AMF) ( Pylkkanen,
Llinas & McElree, Biomag 2004). This establishes a starting
point for a neural investigation of semantic composition. In particular,
I hope to be able to use this activity to shed light on the controversial
question of to what extent the syntactic and semantic systems of natural
language are (in)separable.
back to the top
Biography
Education
- Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002 (Linguistics)
- M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 1997 (Linguistics)
Positions
- Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Psychology, New York University,
NY (2004-present)
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, New York University
& Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, New York University School
of Medicine (2003 - 2004)
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Linguistics,
New York University (2002 - 2003)
Affiliations
- Cognitive Neuroscience Society
- Linguistic Society of America
- Organization for Human Brain Mapping
Fellowships & Awards
- Invitation to be a Fellow at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, Palo Alto,
CA (2005).
- University Research Challenge Fund Award, New York University(2005).
- Provosts Fellowship. Merit Fellowship awarded by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (2000).
- Henry B. Roger's Fellowship. Merit Fellowship
awarded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999).
Pylkkanen, L. (2008). Introducing Arguments. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [BOOK]
Pylkkanen, L. (2008). Mismatching Meanings in Brain and Behavior. Language and Linguistics Compass 2/4, 712-738.
Pylkkanen, L. & McElree, B. (2007). An MEG Study of Silent Meaning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1905-1921. [pdf]
Pylkkanen, L. & McElree, B. (2006). The syntax-semantics
interface: On-line composition of sentence meaning. In M. Traxler & M.A.
Gernsbacher (eds.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2nd Ed). pp. 537-577. NY:
Elsevier. [pdf]
Pylkkanen, L., Llinas, R. & Murphy, G. (2006). Representation
of polysemy: MEG evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18:1,
pp. 113. [pdf]
Pylkkanen, L., Feintuch, S., Hopkins, E., & Marantz, A. (2004).
Neural correlates of the effects of morphological family frequency and
family size: an MEG study. Cognition , 91, B35-B45. [pdf]
Pylkkanen, L., & Marantz, A. (2003). Tracking the time course of
word recognition with MEG. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 187-189.
[pdf]
Pylkkanen, L., Stringfellow, A., & Marantz, A. (2002). Neuromagnetic
evidence for the timing of lexical activation: An MEG component sensitive
to phonotactic probability but not to neighborhood density. Brain
and Language, 81, 666678. [pdf]
Complete
list of publications
Complete
list of presentations
back to the top
Liina Pylkkanen
Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Psychology
Department of Psychology
New York University
6 Washington Place, Room 870
New York, NY 10003
Tel: (212) 998-8386
Fax: (212) 995-4018
Email: liina.pylkkanen@nyu.edu
back to the top
Updated
|
