Mahayana employs experimental and quantitative methods to investigate issues related to sound symbolism and lexical iconicity, and their relationship to language acquisition, processing, and change. She is also dedicated to researching discourse processing, particularly phenomena involving lexical and referential processing. In addition to authoring academic articles and book chapters, she develops instructional materials for the use of quantitative and computational methods in data collection and analysis in Linguistics, and has offered workshops and short courses on these topics at academic institutions and graduate programs in different regions of Brazil.