Susana Novais Santos

biography

After having graduted in Computer Science and Engineering from the Technical University of Lisbon, I decided to apply my engineering skills to the medical field and moved to London, where I obtained a Master's degree in Engineering and Physical Science in Medicine at Imperial College. During my Master's program I was exposed to a wide spectrum of bioengineering tools and techniques, such as implantable medical devices, medical imaging, radiotherapy and telesurgery. I subsequently moved to Penn, where I am currently pursuing a PhD degree in Bioengineering. Having a strong interest in language, I followed a neurolinguistic path, in an effort to help bridge the gap between engineering, medicine and linguistics. Penn is an ideal place for an interface-type of research such as this, as it provides strong inter-departmental interactions. I use behavioral, imaging (fMRI) and computational techniques to investigate the neural substrates of sentence processing. I am studying how healthy, young individuals process sentences that contain a temporary structural ambiguity and/or high working memory load. We observe that a large-scale neural network is activated during this task and that dissociable resources are recruited for processing different kinds of lexical stimuli. We believe that sentence processing is done in a serial, on-line manner, which relies on inherent lexical biases known a priori. A lot of work remains to be done in this exciting field but, since the days of Broca's seminal work on neurolinguistics, we have come a long way in unraveling the complex neural substrate underlying human language comprehension.

projects

• Sentences with a temporary structural ambiguity and high working memory load recruit additional resources for disambiguation: An fMRI study (main project)
• Who did what to whom? A thematic role study (with Jamie Reilly)

publications

jounral articles

conference papers & abstracts