Brian W. Dillon

I’m an assistant professor in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My research focuses on psycholingusitics, the study of how children and adults acquire, process and understand language. In particular, a lot of my work focuses on sentence processing, or the study of how people are able to interpret language at the level of the sentence. My work explores the relationship between working memory systems and linguistic structure. This line of research is informed both by studying licit and illicit dependency formations in online comprehension, using behavioral and electrophysiological methods. In my work, I interpolate insights from theoretical, experimental, and computational view-points on language, and I’ve looked at the processing and acquisition of English, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Inuktitut and Turkish.

Prior to coming to UMass, I studied at the University of Maryland’s CNL lab with professor Colin Phillips and professor William Idsardi.  Before that, I worked with professor Robert Van Valin on the morphosyntax of modern Irish.

My CV is here.