Liina Pylkkänen

Liina Pylkkänen
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Pittsburgh University of Tampere
Scientific career
Institutions	New York University
Thesis	Introducing arguments (2002)

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.^[1] 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.^[2] 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.^[3] 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.^[4] 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.^[5][6] 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.^[7]

Pylkkänen has studied how brains process language expressing facts compared to language expressing possibilities.^[8] She showed that factual language resulted in a rapid increase in brain activity, whilst scenarios conveying possibility resulted in a much less robust response.^[8]

Select publications

• Liina Pylkkänen; Alec Marantz (1 May 2003). "Tracking the time course of word recognition with MEG". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 7 (5): 187–189. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00092-5. ISSN 1364-6613. PMID 12757816. Wikidata Q50764985.
• David Poeppel; Karen Emmorey; Gregory Hickok; Liina Pylkkänen (1 October 2012). "Towards a new neurobiology of language". The Journal of Neuroscience. 32 (41): 14125–14131. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3244-12.2012. ISSN 0270-6474. PMC 3495005. PMID 23055482. Wikidata Q24614814.
• Douglas K Bemis; Liina Pylkkänen (1 February 2011). "Simple composition: a magnetoencephalography investigation into the comprehension of minimal linguistic phrases" (PDF). The Journal of Neuroscience. 31 (8): 2801–2814. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5003-10.2011. ISSN 0270-6474. PMC 6623787. PMID 21414902. S2CID 12479545. Wikidata Q38493289.

Books

^[9]

References

1. Pylkkänen, Liina (10 November 2021). "Unofficial stories". Growing up in Science. New York University. Retrieved 12 October 2023.
2. "Mariliina Pylkkanen". as.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-30.
3. "Introducing arguments | WorldCat.org". www.worldcat.org. Retrieved 2023-07-30.
4. "Facilities – NYU Neurolinguistics Lab". Retrieved 2023-07-30.
5. Pylkkänen, Liina (2019-10-04). "The neural basis of combinatory syntax and semantics". Science. 366 (6461): 62–66. doi:10.1126/science.aax0050. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 31604303.
6. Pylkkänen, Liina (2020-02-03). "Neural basis of basic composition: what we have learned from the red–boat studies and their extensions". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 375 (1791): 20190299. doi:10.1098/rstb.2019.0299. ISSN 0962-8436. PMC 6939357. PMID 31840587.
7. "We're Naturally Bilingual". Language Magazine. 2021-11-15. Retrieved 2023-07-30.
8. "How Do We Separate the Factual from the Possible? New Research Shows How Our Brain Responds to Both". www.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-30.
9. Pylkkänen, Liina (2008). Introducing arguments. Linguistic inquiry monographs. Cambridge, Mass: MIT press. ISBN 978-0-262-66209-3.