I am a researcher at the Department of Human Studies and affiliated
with Centro di Ricerca Interdisciplinare sul Linguaggio (CRIL). My
current research, in collaboration with Prof. Mirko Grimaldi, focuses on
second language acquisition, with a particular emphasis on the
perception and production of L2 sounds. I investigate how targeted
phonetic training can support learners of English as a second language
in acquiring challenging phonological contrasts, integrating behavioral
methods and acoustic analysis within experimental paradigms to
examine L2 speech perception and production.
I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from CIMEC (Centro
Interdipartimentale Mente e Cervello), University of Trento, with a
dissertation on computational linguistics and emotion expression in
dialogue. I was subsequently awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship and
joined the University of Birmingham (UK), where I collaborated with
Sotaro Kita on bilingualism and the transfer of co-speech gestures. I
then held a postdoctoral position at the Sign Language Research Lab at
the University of Haifa, where I studied the compositionality of
emotional expressions. Returning to Italy, I completed a post-doc at the
University of Padova, examining prosody and gesture in L2
communication, particularly their coordination at intonational and
phrasal boundaries.
Alongside my academic work, I serve as a scientific consultant,
supporting companies in the development of AI and Natural Language
Processing applications. I am especially committed to promoting
gender-balanced language in NLP technologies.