Liina Pylkkänen

Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Psychology

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Research

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 John's 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) ( Pylkkänen, 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.

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Teaching

• G61.2710/G89.3402: Neurolinguistics, grad.
- Fall 2007
- Fall 2005
- Spring 2003

• G61.3710: Advanced Seminar in Neurolinguistics, grad.
- Spring 2007

• V61.0028, Language and Mind, undergrad.
- Spring 2006 (Blackboard website)
- Spring 2007 (Blackboard website)

• G61.2370-001, Semantics II , grad.

• G61.3340-001: Seminar in Semantics, grad.
- Spring 2006: Mechanisms of Noncompositionality Resolution

• Neurolinguistics, LOT Winterschool 2005, Groningen, The Netherlands

• MEG, the Mental Lexicon and Morphology

• Slides from a recent guest lecture on MEG and visual word recognition, (03/01/04)

Biography

Education

• Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002 (Linguistics)
• M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 1997 (Linguistics)

Positions

 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).
• Provost's 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).

Selected Publications

Pylkkänen, L. (2008). Introducing Arguments. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Pylkkänen, L. & McElree, B. (2007). An MEG Study of Silent Meaning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, [pdf], 19, 1905-1921.

Pylkkänen, 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]

Pylkkänen, L., Llinas, R. & Murphy, G. (2006). Representation of polysemy: MEG evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18:1, pp. 1-13. [pdf]

McElree, B., Pylkkänen, L., Pickering, M., & Traxler, M. (2006). The time course of enriched composition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13(1):53-9. [pdf]

Pylkkänen, 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]

Pylkkänen, L., & Marantz, A. (2003). Tracking the time course of word recognition with MEG. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 187-189. [pdf]

Pylkkänen, 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, 666-678. [pdf]

Complete list of publications

Complete list of presentations

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Address

Liina Pylkkänen
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

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