I am interested in speech perception and production representation/processing, integrating the linguistic with the neurobiological perspective. My investigation tries to explain what are the linguistic-neurophysiological primitives and the elementary operations that lead the encoding of temporal mechanisms so that computational and representational processes can be generated in the auditory-motor cortices. In simple words, how vibrations in the air are transformed in the ear so that mental representations can arise in the brain? And how mental representations in the brain are transformed in vibrations in the air through the precise control of the vocal apparatus, while the ear controls the outputs?

This line of research is also projected onto second language (L2) phonetics-phonology acquisition in formal context (classroom): i.e., Foreign Language Acquisition. My research focuses on L2 perception and production abilities. Since in Foreign Language Acquisition the quality and quantity of L2 inputs are impoverished, and teachers generally neglect the phonetics-phonology level, I explore the possibility to develop specific trainings capable to remodulate the neuroplasticity of auditory and motor areas, so that L2 sounds categorization and pronunciation can be improved by learners.

My interest in phonetics and phonology arose many years ago investigating dialectal variation. The discovery in the late 1990s of vocal harmony processes (metaphony) in the southern Salentino area led me to explore this phenomenon from different perspectives. Pursuing acoustic-articulatory research, I try to understand the nature of inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation found in this area and, in parallel, to establish what feature/s are involved in the assimilatory process and what interacting parameters/restrictions control the spreading of the feature/s. From a neurophysiological point of view, I want to ascertain how the auditory system of these speakers processes phonemes and the allophonic variants generated by metaphony.

Other lines of research that attracted my attention are the behavioral and neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor, the processing of Which interrogative sentences, and the application linguistics in the forensic field.