Francesca's main interest concerns the role of cognitive and communicative pressures in shaping language structures.

In her research, language is addressed as a communication code as well as a product of the brain. These two aspects and their interplay are examined through information-theoretical methods, especially applied to mine large collections of texts, and through psycholinguistic experiments that measure the effects of perceptual and conceptual properties in language learning and comprehension.

Aimed at exploring how the cross-linguistic grammatical regularities emerge in respose to these factors, Francesca's research at the L2R Lab mostly focuses on language morphology.