Fernanda Ferreira Professor

Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences
University of Edinburgh

Email: fernanda.ferreira@ed.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)131 650 9864 (office), +44 (0) 131 650 3416 (fax)
Mail: Psychology, 7 George Square, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK EH8 9JZ

Here's my cv (updated August 2009)

My research area is psycholinguistics. I'm Chair of Language and Cognition and Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. I'm PI on a three year grant funded by the ESRC called "Good Enough Language Processing: Effects of Reanalysis Difficulty on Comprehension and Production of Subsequent Material", and I'm co-Investigator on a three year ESRC grant with Christoph Scheepers (PI) on Get-Passives.My laboratory is equipped with two Eyelink 1000 eyetrackers, one Eyelink II, speech analysis equipment and software, and numerous computers for running e-prime studies and conducting data analysis. We also have recently set up an ERP laboratory. If you're interested in working with me on a PhD, send me an email message.

Research interests

I'm interested in questions such as these:

• How do people parse sentences?
• How are disfluencies handled by the comprehension system? 
• How does the comprehension system recover from garden-paths? 
• Do we sometimes create underspecified representations during processing?
• How does the language system make use of prosodic information?
• How do the visual and language systems interact?
• How do speakers plan their utterances?
• How do they choose a particular syntactic and prosodic structure for a sentence? 
• At what point during production do speakers realize they’re about to produce a grammatically illegal sequence, and what do they do about it?
• Is language production incremental? 
• What is the relationship between prosody and disfluency in production?

Language and Cognitive Science at Edinburgh:

• Language at Edinburgh
• Department of Linguistics and English Language
• School of Informatics
• Human Communication Research Centre
• Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems
• Centre for Speech Technology Research
• Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit
• Edinburgh-Stanford Link
• Department of Philosophy
• Mind, Language, and Embodied Cognition MSc.
• Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour
• Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation
• Brain Imaging Research Centre
• Queen Margaret University College Speech Sciences Research Centre

Students and Post-docs

• Jens Apel
• Sasha Calhoun
• Paul Engelhardt
• Sukru Baris Demiral
• Laura Speed

Collaborators

• Joyce Chai, Michigan State University
• Kiel Christianson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Charles Clifton, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• John Henderson, University of Edinburgh
• Andriy Myachykov, University of Glasgow
• Nikole Patson, University of Pittsburgh
• Christoph Scheepers, University of Glasgow
• Antonella Sorace, University of Edinburgh
• Ben Swets, Grand Valley State University

My brother, Vic Ferreira, is a psycholinguist at UCSD.

Papers (since 2000)

Chai, J., Fang, R., & Ferreira, F. (in press). Between linguistic attention and gaze fixations in multimodal conversational interfaces. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). Cambridge: MA.

Engelhardt, P. E., Ferreira, F., & Patsenko, E. G. (in press). Pupillometry reveals processing load during spoken language comprehension. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Engelhardt, P. E., & Ferreira, F. (in press). Processing coordination ambiguity. Language and Speech.

Engelhardt, P. E., Ferreira, F., & Nigg, J. T. (2009). Priming sentence production in adolescents and adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.

Ferreira, F., Engelhardt, P. E., & Jones, M. W. (2009). Good enough language processing: A satisficing approach. In N. Taatgen, H. Rijn, J. Nerbonne, & L. Schomaker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Patson, N.D., Darowski, E.S., Moon, N, & Ferreira, F. (2009). Lingering misinterpretations in garden-path sentences: Evidence from a paraphrasing task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 35, 280-285.

Patson, N.D., & Ferreira, F. (2009). Conceptual plural information is used to guide early parsing decisions: Evidence from garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 464-486.

Ferreira, F., Apel, J., & Henderson, J.M. (2008). Taking a new look at looking at nothing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 405-410.

Engelhardt, P.E., Nigg, J.T., Carr, L.A., & Ferreira, F. (2008). Cognitive inhibition and working memory in attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117, 591-605.

Engelhardt, P. E., Xiang, M., & Ferreira, F. (2008). Anticipatory eye movements mediated by word order constraints. In B. C. Love, K. McRae, & V. M. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 951-957). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Clifton, C., & Ferreira, F. (2008). Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities: Evidence from self-paced reading. Memory & Cognition, 36, 201-216.

Ferreira, F., & Tanenhaus, M.K. (2007). Introduction to the special issue on language-vision interactions. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 455-459.pdf

Ferreira, F. (2007). Prosody and performance in language production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22, 1151-1177. pdf

Bailey, K.G.B., & Ferreira, F. (2007). The processing of filled pause disfluencies in the visual world. In R. P. G. van Gompel, M. H. Fischer, W. S. Murray and R. L. Hill (Eds.), Eye Movements: A Window on Mind and Brain (pp. 485-500). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Inc. pdf

Ferreira, F., & Patson, N. (2007). The good enough approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, pp 71-83. pdf

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D.Z., & Ferreira, F. (2007). "The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: A psychometric approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 64-81. pdf

Christianson, K., Williams, C., Zacks, R., & Ferreira, F. (2006). Younger and older adults’ good enough interpretations of garden-path sentences. Discourse Processes, 42, 205-238. pdf

Ferreira, F., & Engelhardt, P. (2006). Syntax and production. In M. A. Gernsbacher & M. Traxler (Eds.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 61-91). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Inc. pdf

Engelhardt, P., Bailey, K.G.B., & Ferreira, F. (2006). Do speakers and listeners obey the Gricean Maxim of Quantity? Journal of Memory and Language, 554-573. pdf

Ferreira, F., & Swets, B. (2005). The production and comprehension of resumptive pronouns in relative clause “island” contexts. In A. Cutler (Ed.), Twenty-first Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones (pp. 263-278). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pdf

Christianson, K., & Ferreira, F. (2005). Conceptual accessibility and sentence production in a free word order language (Odawa). Cognition, 98, 105-135. pdf

Ferreira, F. (2005). Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science. The Linguistic Review, 22, 365-380. pdf

Lau, E., & Ferreira, F. (2005). Lingering effects of disfluent material on comprehension of garden path sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 633-666. pdf

Bailey, K.G.B.., & Ferreira, F. (2004). The disfluent hairy dog: Can syntactic parsing be affected by non-word disfluencies? ? In J. Trueswell & M.K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), World situated language use: Psycholinguistic, linguistic, and computational perspectives on bridging the product and action traditions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ferreira, F., & Bailey, K.G.D. (2004). Disfluencies and human language comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Science, 8, 231-237. pdf

Ferreira, F., & Henderson, J. M. (2004). Introduction to the interface of vision, language, and action. In J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira (Eds.), The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world. New York: Psychology Press.

Ferreira, F., Lau, E.F., & Bailey, K.G.D. (2004). Disfluencies, parsing, and tree-adjoining grammars. Cognitive Science, 28, 721-749. pdf

Henderson, J. M., & Ferreira, F. (2004). Scene perception for psycholinguists. In J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira (Eds.), The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world. New York: Psychology Press.pdf

Ferreira, F. (2003). The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 47, 164-203. pdf

Bailey, K.G.B , & Ferreira, F. (2003). Disfluencies influence syntactic parsing. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 183-200. pdf

Davidson, D.J., Zacks, R.T., & Ferreira, F. (2003). Age preservation of the syntactic processor in production. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32, 541-566.

Ferreira, F. (2002). Prosody. In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London, U.K.: Macmillan Reference Ltd.

Ferreira, F, Ferraro, V., & Bailey, K.G.D. (2002). Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 11-15. pdf

Ferreira, F. (2002). Review of Townsend and Bever’s Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules. Trends in Cognitive Science, 26, 52-53.

Ferreira, F., & Swets, B. (2002). How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 57-84. pdf

Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J., & Ferreira, F. (2001). Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 368-407. pdf

Ferreira, F., Christianson, K., & Hollingworth, A. (2001). Misinterpretations of garden-path sentences: Implications for models of reanalysis. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 3-20.

Ferreira, F. (2000). Syntax in language production: An approach using tree-adjoining grammars. In L. Wheeldon (Ed.), Aspects of Language Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.