Profile

Biography

• Comahue National University, Argentina BSc, MA (1990)
• Brown University, MSc in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences (1996)
• Brown University, PhD in Cognitive and Linguistics Sciences (1999)

Career

Graduated from Brown University in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. After 4 years postdoctoral research on language processing and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin (USA), she moved to a lectureship at Sussex before joining York in 2005.

Departmental roles

She teaches  introduction to psychology of language in the first year of the undergraduate degree and Research methods in Neuroimaging in the Cognitive Neuroscience MSc program. She also offers advanced courses on psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience of language in the third year of the undergraduate program.

University roles

Director of the MsC in Cognitive Neuroscience

Research

Overview

Sentence production and comprehension, cognitive neuroscience of language, representing time and space in language, the interaction of language, attention and cognition in different languages.

Current projects

I am currently working on the relationship between production and comprehension in sentence processing. This includes research on the influence of native language on processing mechanisms, i.e., comparisons across different languages.

I am also working on the representation of time in language comprehension, e.g., how  we understand the duration of the events that we hear about in language, and more generally, whether these temporal representations make contact with representations of time independently of language use.

I would be happy to supervise projects in these areas using neuro-imaging, eye-tracking and other behavioral techniques.

Research group(s)

• Language Processing

Collaborators

• Maryellen MacDonald  - University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Barbara Malt - University of Lehigh
• Gerry Altmann, Garreth Gaskell, Jelena Mirkovic - University of York
• Marta Coll-Florit  - Open University of Catalonia, Spain
  
• Manuel de Vega - University of Laguna, Spain
  

Supervision

Gina Humphreys

Publications

Selected publications

• Coll-Florit, M. and Gennari. S. P. (2011). Time in language: Event duration in sentence comprehension, Cognitive Psychology, 62, 41-79.
• Rodriguez-Ferreiro, J., Gennari, S. P., Davies, R., Cuetos, F. (2011). Neural correlates of abstract verb processing, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(1), 106-118.
  
• Moody, C. L., and Gennari, S. P. (2010). Effects of implied physical effort in sensory-motor and pre-frontal cortex during language comprehension, NeuroImage, 49, 782-793.
• Gennari, S. P., and MacDonald, M. C. (2009). Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses, Cognition, 111, 1-23.
• Malt, B. C., Gennari, S. P., Imai, M., Ameel, E., Tsuda, N., and Majid, A. (2008). Talking about walking: Biomechanics and the language of locomotion, Psychological Science, 19, 232-240.
• Gennari, S. P., and MacDonald, M. C. (2008). Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses, Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 161-187.
• Gennari, S. P., MacDonald, M. C., Postle, B. R. and Seidenberg, M. S. (2007). Context-dependent interpretation of Words: Evidence for interactive neural processes, NeuroImage, 35, 1278-1286.
• Gennari, S. Poeppel, D. (2003).  Processing correlates of lexical semantic complexity, Cognition, 89(1), B27-41.
• Gennari, S. P., Sloman, S., Malt, B., and Fitch, T. (2002). Motion events in language and congition, Cognition, 83, 49-79.
  

Full publications list

A full list of publications and downloads can be found on Silvia Gennari's personal web page.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Introduction to psychology of Language
  
• The Language Machine: from Sentences to Meaning

Postgraduate

• Research Design in Neuroimaging

External activities

Memberships

• Cognitive Neuroscience Society of America
• Cognitive Science Society
• American Psychological Association
• Experimental Psychology Society

Editorial duties

• Language and Cognitive Processes - Editorial board member
• Frontiers in Cognition  - Review editor