Antonia Tovar

Ph.D. candidate researcher

I was born in Sabadell (Catalonia).  I finished my degree in Spanish Language and Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Barcelona) in 2014. I was interested in syntax and information structure so my final project of the degree ‘Estrategías de focalización de la gramática del español’ consisted of studying different syntactic configurations used to mark focal information in Spanish. In 2015, I started a master in Language and Cognitive Science at the Universitat de Barcelona. I also became a member of the Grammar and Cognition Lab and I started my TFM under the supervision of Wolfram Hinzen. In this project, which title was ‘Linguistic dimensions of cognitive decline in Huntington’s disease’, we investigated language disintegration in Huntington’s disease (HD). HD affects subcortical circuits (basal ganglia), a brain zone considered essential to language processing. Due to this reason, the study of HD may serve as model of linguistic deterioration following striatal neurodegeneration.

At the present, I am starting my PhD on binding problems in the HD population. I am working to the hypothesis that patients will show less sensitivity to locality conditions.