Liina Pylkkänen is a Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at
New York University. Her research considers the neurobiology of language and theoretical linguistics.
Early life and education
Pylkkänen grew up in
Tampere, Finland. Pylkkänen studied philology at the
University of Tampere. She was an undergraduate exchange student at the
University of Pittsburgh, and decided to move there for her graduate studies. In 1997 she joined
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a doctoral researcher. Her doctorate explored verbal argument structure and cross-linguistic variations in introducing arguments. She joined
New York University as a postdoctoral fellow in 2002.
Research and career
Pylkkänen was appointed to the faculty at
New York University in 2004, where she was promoted to Professor in 2016. She studies the combinatory potential of human language. She combines semantic theories and computational work with
magnetoencephalography and
functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...
. Her early work considered the syntax–semantics interface, with a particular focus on grammar.
She became interested in the neural mechanisms that are responsible for the combinatorics of language and syntactic structure building. Her research showed that human brains routinely combine words from different languages, showing that people who are bilingual naturally switch between languages because their combinatory mechanisms do not see the language as different.
Pylkkänen has studied how brains process language expressing facts compared to language expressing possibilities.
She showed that factual language resulted in a rapid increase in brain activity, whilst scenarios conveying possibility resulted in a much less robust response.
Select publications
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Books
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pylkkanen, Liina
Finnish philologists
Living people
New York University faculty
21st-century philologists
University of Tampere alumni
University of Pittsburgh alumni
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Women philologists
Year of birth missing (living people)
Finnish expatriates in the United States
People from Tampere