I am a postdoctoral research associate in the Faculty of Linguistics Phonology and Phonetics, working on language acquisition with a focus on morphosyntax. I studied linguistics at the University of Siena (Italy) and in 2025 I received my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind from the University School of Advanced Studies (IUSS Pavia, Italy). There, I explored the developmental predictions of grammatical accounts of scalar implicatures, drawing a parallel between the acquisition of this phenomenon and the acquisition of complex syntactic structures.

Research

My main research interest is language acquisition, with a focus on syntactic dependencies and phenomena at the interface between syntax and semantics-pragmatics. 

Here in the faculty, I am working on the acquisition of syntax in French within the project ‘Growing Grammar’, led by Prof. Sam Wolfe in collaboration with Prof. Adriana Belletti (Siena) and Prof. Luigi Rizzi (Collège de France). The main aim of this project is to study the development of syntax in very young children through the lens of syntactic cartography, and to explore the connections between maturational accounts of language acquisition, and the diachronic stability of morphosyntactic properties.

My other research interests include experimental syntax, wh-question processing and the notion of linguistic complexity.

Selected publications

Chesi, C., V. Bressan, A. Belletti. 2023. The Role of D-Linking and Lexical Restriction in Locality Violations. Quaderni Di Linguistica e Studi Orientali 9 (September):29–43. https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-15162.

Bressan, V. 2022. Scalar Implicatures like Object A’-Dependencies: Feature Inclusion in Early Grammars. RGG 44.