Giulia Bencini, PhD
Assistant Professor

Phone: 212 481 4435
Email: Giulia Bencini

Professional Interests: Language acquisition in typical and atypical populations, language processing, cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, language in Alzheimer's Disease, aphasia

Courses Taught: Neural Processes of Communication, Adult Neurogenic Disorders, Communication in Aging, Language Science, Phonetics

Dr. Bencini is originally from Italy, where she studied Linguistics at the University of Florence. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Illinois in 2002, specializing in psycholinguistics. From 2004-2008 she was an National Institute of Health funded post-doctoral research fellow working at the Language Acquisition Research Center, at Hunter College-CUNY. Dr. Bencini is currently an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences Program at the Hunter College Brookdale Health Sciences campus.  

Dr. Bencini's research investigates the knowledge representations and processes underlying the unique human ability to produce and understand new sentences. She adopted an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights and methods from linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, and language pathology. Different research projects examine the mapping between linguistic meaning and linguistic form in typical and atypical language development, in adult language use, and language impairment. Some of the questions that guide this research program are: What are the nature and format of children’s early sentence-level representations? What linguistic representations are used during language processing – comprehension and production? What is the interplay between linguistic knowledge and more general cognitive factors such as memory? What is the nature of language impairments? Do they reflect impaired knowledge, or defective access to knowledge?