Dr. Laura Maffongelli

Dr. Laura Maffongelli graduated in Neurolinguistics from Philipps University Marburg in 2011. Shortly thereafter, she moved back to her home country, where she completed her PhD in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Genoa (Italian Institute of Technology, Italy) in 2015. Since then, her research interests have focused on the relationship between language and action with regard to the syntactic mechanisms involved. She investigated the neurophysiological basis of the processing of complex action sequences during action observation, first in adults (Robotic, Brain and Cognitive Sciences (RBCS) at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 2012-2015) and later in infants (PostDoc at the University of Zurich, Department of Developmental Psychology, 2015-2017). She also worked in the Scene Grammar Lab at Goethe University Frankfurt, where she researched "scene grammar" in relation to syntax (2018-2019).
She is currently conducting research at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, where she is investigating the processing of various complex, hierarchical structures in the language and action domain in preschool children. EEG (ERPs), eye tracking and TMS measurements are the basic methods of her research. She is interested in the extent to which the processing of complex action sequences is similar to the processing of complex sentences. Her results indicate precisely this connection. A change in the structure of an action, the action syntax, leads - even in children as young as 6 months old - to similar reactions in the electroencephalogram (EEG) as a comparable violation of the syntax of a heard or read sentence. This also allows conclusions to be drawn about the language development of infants.