Maria Piñango

Maria Piñango is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and in Yale’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience program. She is also faculty member in the Wu Tsai Institute. Currently, she serves as Faculty Director for the Yale Education Studies Program and is beginning her second term as senator in Yale’s Faculty Senate.

Piñango’s research seeks to uncover the neurocognitive system that supports word meaning structures and the conceptual and memory systems from which those structures emerge.  It seeks to understand this connection between linguistic meaning and its cognitive embedding not only in terms of how such meaning is stored by the mind, but also in terms of how it is put to use in real-time.  Her lab carries out this research using various empirical and experimental methods integrated in a mutually informing manner. These methods come from linguistics (e.g., introspection, fieldwork, and questionnaires), psychology (e.g., self-paced reading, lexical-decision, eye-tracking), cognitive neuroscience (e.g., focal brain lesions, EEG/ERP, and fMRI), and computational modeling (e.g., dynamic field theory).