Personal Profile:

After completing a BA in Spanish (2005) and an MA in German and Theoretical Linguistics (2011), I did a second MA in European Languages here at the FU (2014). I have been working at the Brain-Language Lab Berlin since July 2012, where I completed my research for my MA Thesis. I have learned to speak many foreign languages as an adult, and I am therefore interested in how we acquire new foreign languages later in life. I also enjoy teaching and engaging students on neurology- and linguistics-related subjects. When I’m not in the lab or the classroom, I enjoy reading, baking, and traveling the world.

Research Interests:

I am interested in embodied cognition and the embodiment of grammar in neural circuitry. I would like to better understand how the adult brain acquires new words and languages. Fundamentally I am interested in the neural mechanisms that support language, and how this develops in healthy adults. For my PhD I am focusing on investigating neurological evidence of semantic and syntactic indexing after a few short sessions of learning, as well as how language may enhance our ability to discriminate between similar concepts.

Publications:

• Lucchese, G., Hanna, J., Autenrieb, A. Miller, T.M.C., & Pulvermüller, F. (2016).Electrophysiological Evidence for Early and Interactive Symbol Access and Rule Processing in Retrieving and Combining Language Constructions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01038