Psycholinguistics | UMass Linguistics

UMass Amherst is home to a highly active and interdisciplinary psycholinguistics community, comprising researchers both in the Linguistics department and in the Psychological and Brain Sciences department. Psycholinguistic research at UMass focuses on integrating linguistic theory with psycholinguistic theory, in the areas of speech perception, adult sentence comprehension and phonology. Research on sentence comprehension focuses on syntactic, semantic, and discourse processing with adult native speakers, both in English and in other languages spoken in our local community (e.g. Korean, Chinese, and Spanish). Sentence processing research at UMass also focuses on the interface between linguistic processing and other cognitive systems, such as working memory or extra-linguistic reasoning. Research on language production focuses on understanding the mechanisms involved in mapping meaning to linguistic structure in language production, focusing on how this varies cross-linguistically and across different types of linguistic structures. Research on speech perception focuses on the contributions of auditory processes, linguistic knowledge, and their interaction to recognizing and discriminating speech sounds. The interface between phonetics and phonology is studied by examining how listeners’ perceptual response to speech sounds influences sounds’ behavior in phonological grammars and sound change. Phonological psycholinguistics at UMass investigates native speaker knowledge, and learning of artificial languages. Psycholinguists at UMass explore these areas using a wide variety of experimental techniques, such as eye-tracking while reading and listening, ERP/EEG recordings, and behavioral experiments in the lab and on the web. Psycholinguistic research at UMass also involves computational modeling of language processing and learning.

Faculty in Linguistics

Brian Dillon brian@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Psycholinguistics, Syntax
Lyn Frazier lyn@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Psycholinguistics, Syntax and its interfaces
Gaja Jarosz jarosz@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Phonology, Learnability, Computational Modeling, Acquisition
John Kingston jkingston@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Phonetics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics
Shota Momma snegishi@umass.edu		Research interests: Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Sentence Production
Joe Pater pater@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Phonological Theory and Learning, Computational and Experimental Methods
Kristine Yu krisyu@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Prosody from the Speech Signal on Up, Phonetics, Phonology

Faculty in Psychological and Brain Sciences

Charles Clifton

Lisa Sanders

Adrian Staub

Graduate students

Özge Bakay obakay@umass.edu	Research interests: Sentence Processing, Prosody, Turkish and Laz	Year started: 2021
Mari Kugemoto mkugemoto@umass.edu	Research interests: Psycholinguistics, syntax, Japanese	Year started: 2020
Ericka Mayer elmayer@umass.edu	Research interests: Research interests: Semantics, psycholinguistics, in particular the processing of presuppositions, negation, NPIs, and monotonicity.	Year started: 2017
Yosho Miyata ymiyata@umass.edu		Year started: 2019
Anissa Neal anneal@umass.edu	Research interests: Psycholinguistics, syntax, syntax-semantics interface	Year started: 2018
Alex Nyman anyman@umass.edu	Research interests: Phonetics and phonology, language acquisition, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics	Year started: 2018
Breanna Pratley bpratley@umass.edu		Year started: 2021