Education

• Ph.D., Psychology, Univ. of Mass., Amherst 1988
• M.A., Linguistics, Univ. of Mass., Amherst 1986
• M.S., Psychology, Univ. of Mass., Amherst 1985
• B.A., Psychology, University of Manitoba, Canada, 1982

About

In addition to her academic role, Fernanda Ferreira serves as an elected member of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society and serves as an associate editor of the journal, Cognitive Psychology and an editor of Collabra. She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Research Focus

Professor Ferreira’s area of research is psycholinguistics. She uses basic insights from formal linguistics, especially theories in sentence phonology and syntax, to develop models of processing. Her empirical work relies both on behavioral and neural measures, including eyetracking (for measurement of fixations, saccades and pupil diameter) and the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). The fundamental aim of her research is to uncover the mechanisms that enable humans to understand and generate language in real time and in cooperation with other cognitive systems.

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Lab

Publications

Ferreira, F., & Rehrig, G. (2019). Linearisation during language production: evidence from scene meaning and saliency maps. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1-11.

Lowder, M. W., & Ferreira, F. (2019). I see what you meant to say: Anticipating speech errors during online sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Beier, E. J., & Ferreira, F. (2018). The temporal prediction of stress in speech and its relation to musical beat perception. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 431.

Ferreira, F., & Chantavarin, S. (2018). Integration and prediction in language processing: a synthesis of old and new. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(6), 443-448.

Maxfield, N. D., & Ferreira, F. (2018). Backward-looking sentence processing in typically disfluent versus stuttered speech: ERP evidence. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1-19.

Choi, W., Lowder, M. W., Ferreira, F., Swaab, T. Y., & Henderson, J. M. (2017). Effects of word predictability and preview lexicality on eye movements during reading: A comparison between young and older adults. Psychology and aging, 32(3), 232-242.

Henderson, J. M., Choi, W., Lowder, M. W., & Ferreira, F. (2016). Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading. NeuroImage, 132, 293-300.

Lowder, M. W., & Ferreira, F. (2016). Prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 1400-1416.

Clifton, C. Jr., Ferreira, F., Henderson, J. M., Inhoff, A. W., Liversedge, S. P., Reichle, E. D., & Schotter, E. R. (2016). Eye movements in reading and information processing: Keith Rayner’s 40 year legacy. Journal of Memory and Language, 86, 1-19.

Ferreira, F., & Çokal, D. (2015). Sentence processing. In G. Hickok & S. L. Small (Eds.), Neurobiology of language (pp. 265-274). Academic Press.

Ferreira, F., Foucart, A., & Engelhardt, P. E. (2013). Language processing in the visual world: Effects of preview, visual complexity, and prediction. Journal of Memory and Language. 69, 165-182.

Engelhardt, P. E., Demiral, S. B., & Ferreira, F. (2011). Over-specified referential expressions impair comprehension: An ERP study. Brain and Cognition, 77, 304-314.

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

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Teaching

Professor Ferreira teaches in the areas of cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, language comprehension, language production, prosody and disfluency, individual differences, and working memory and language processing.

Awards

Professor Ferreira has won numerous awards throughout her career, including the 1996 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (Cognition and Human Learning).