Sandra Villata University of Enna Kore

Sandra Villata is an Assistant Professor at the University of Enna Kore (Italy). She earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Geneva in 2017 and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Connecticut and NYU Abu Dhabi. As an experimental linguist, she explores the interface between syntax and sentence processing using formal experimental methods, including acceptability judgments, self-paced reading, maze tasks, and computational modeling. Her research addresses three core questions in sentence-level language science: (i) the nature of grammar, (ii) the nature of the human sentence processing system, and (iii) the relationship between the two. She has extensively studied syntactic islands and agreement phenomena across multiple languages, including Italian, English, French, Spanish, and Slavic languages.