Matt Wagers

Hello

I am a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research interest is in language processing, especially the coordination of syntactic information in memory. I teach courses at UCSC on psycholinguistics, experimental methods & design, language and memory, and syntax.

I completed my Ph.D. in Linguistics at UMD (2008), supervised by Colin Phillips (dissertation). Before that, I did my A.B. in Molecular Biology at Princeton University (2003), with Certificates in Neuroscience and in Linguistics.

In 2025-2026, I am the Faculty Director for Curriculum and Enrollment in the Division of Humanities.

Teaching

Summer 2025

Office hours

For student collaborators

"Working Together"

... past teaching

What's Happening

A new encyclopedia article, co-authored with Brian Dillon, in the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science:: Sentence Processing. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.624d819a
We will be at CogSci 2025 (30 Jul - 2 Aug; San Francisco):: (lecture) How linguistic boundaries form encoding contexts in memory: Evidence from temporal order effects with first authors Lalitha Balachandran & Stephanie Rich; (poster) P2-Y-221 Who and when gets the race? Two processing routes for the advantages and penalties of pronominal ambiguity resolution with first author Ruoqing Yao

We kicked-off our UCOP MRPI Planning Grant (2025-2027) with a journal club: Leveraging California’s Linguistic Diversity to Improve Large Language Models
A new manuscript with first authors Mandy Cartner (TAU), Matthew Kogan, & Nikolas Webster and Ivy Sichel: (LingBuzz) Subject islands do not reduce to construction-specific discourse function; Set of experimental syntax studies showing that subject islands exact a near-constant cost across multiple construction types.
... at the 47th GLOW Colloquium: Information structure alone cannot account for subject islandhood: an experimental study with first authors Nikolas Webster, Mandy Cartner (TAU), Matthew Kogan & Matt Wagers and Ivy Sichel
... at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, HSP2025, Mar 27-29, 2025, University of Maryland: Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: cross-constructional evidence with first authors Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner (TAU), and Nikolas Webster & Matt Wagers and Ivy Sichel; Ambiguity advantage effect in wh-questions> with first author Joshua Lieberstein & Matt Wagers; Now you see it... ? : Agreement sensitivity in at-a-glance reading in Spanish with first author Subhekshya Shrestha & Dustin Chacón; Who gets to start the race? Distinguished referents in pronominal ambiguity resolution with first author Ruoqing Yao & Matt Wagers
... as did our lab alumni:: Eager interpretation of discourse-level ambiguities: New evidence for costly reanalysis, John Duff (Saarland; UCSC Ph.D. 2023) & Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford; UCSC Ph.D. 2021) (with Daniel Altshuler); Building a Cross-Linguistic Typology of Sentence Planning from Case Alignment, Caroline Andrews (Zurich; UCSC B.A. 2011) (with Sebastian Sauppe, Roberto Zariquiey & Balthasar Bickel); Processing Switch Reference Marking in Nungon: Comprehension & Production Measures, Adam Morgan (NYU Langone; UCSC M.A. 2013) (with Jenny Yu, Ismael Dono, Lyn Ögate, & Hannah Sarvasy); From Single Words to Sentence Production: Shared Cortical Representations but Distinct Temporal Dynamics, Adam Morgan (NYU Langone; UCSC M.A. 2013) (with Orrin Devinsky, Werner Doyle, Patricia Dugan, Daniel Friedman, & Adeen Flinker)

⌜ 2024 ⌟

A tale of two Tagalogs with first author Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 9(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.11032

⌜ 2023 ⌟

Encoding interference in verb-initial languages. In Koizumi, M., Ed., Issues in Japanese Psycholinguistics from Comparative Perspectives, Volume 1: Cross-Linguistic Studies. doi:0.1515/9783110778946

⌜ 2022 ⌟

Processing reflexive pronouns when they don’t announce themselves with Sandra Chung and Manuel F. Borja. Glossa Psycholinguistics 1(1). doi:10.5070/G601174.
Data archive: doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/BWCZT.
Extraction from English RCs and Cross-Linguistic Similarities in the Environments That Facilitate Extraction with first author Jake Vincent & Ivy Sichel. Languages, 7(2), 117. Open Access, doi:10.3390/languages7020117.
Memory for linguistic features and the focus of attention: evidence from the dynamics of agreement inside DP with Brian McElree. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience. DOI 10.1080/23273798.2022.2057559.
Evidence for a universal parsing principle in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec with Kelsey Sasaki, Steven Foley, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Fe Silva-Robles, & Maziar Toosarvandani. Unpublished manuscript. Data archive: doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/2WGD8.

(Less) recent Papers

⌜ 2021 ⌟

On the universality of intrusive resumption: Evidence from Chamorro and Palauan with Sandra Chung. Postprint. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 39(3), 759-801. Data archive: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/H5YAV.

⌜ 2020 ⌟

Hierarchical structure and memory mechanisms in agreement attraction with Julie Franck (U Genève). PLoS ONE, 15(5). 10.1371/journal.pone.0232163. Data archive: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/J85SP.
The predictive value of Tagalog voice morphology in filler-gap dependency formation with first author Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara (UCSC). Front Psychol, 11, 517. 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00517

⌜ 2019 ⌟

Acceptability with the tools of signal detection theory with Brian Dillon. To appear in G. Goodall, Ed., Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax. Preprint.
Language processing experiments in the field with Sandra Chung. To appear in J. Sprouse, Ed., Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax. eScholarship (UC Repository)
A new argument for co-active parses ... with Brian Dillon, Caroline Andrews, & Caren Rotello. J Exp Psychol: Learn Mem Cogn, 45, 1271-86. doi:10.1037/xlm0000649 Preprint.

⌜ 2018 ⌟

Grammatical licensing and relative clause parsing ... with Sandra Chung and Manuel F. Borja. Cognition, 178, 207-221. May 2018 postprint
English resumptive pronouns ... with first author Adam Morgan (UCSD). Linguistic Inquiry, 49 861-876. PDF; Postprint: https://osf.io/nj2mq/.
Developing incrementality ... with first author Emily Atkinson (UMich). Cognition, 179, 132-149.

... Past events ↯↯↯

Lab members

undergrad/R.A. alums
Ashley Ippolito
Emily Pendleton
Caroline Andrews
Joseph King
Melanie Esver
Sylvia Soule
Shayne Sloggett
Sarah Napoli

Dissertations and Theses

2023

Matthew Kogan. Maintaining Syntactic Positions and Thematic Roles in Memory. M.A. Thesis, June 2023.
Elifnur Ulusoy. Connectivity and case effects in agreement attraction: The case of Turkish. M.A. Thesis, June 2023.

2021

Jake Vincent. Extraction from Relative Clauses: An Experimental Investigation into Variable Island Effects in English—or—This is a Dissertation That We Really Needed to Find Someone Who'd Write. Ph.D. Dissertation, June, 2021.
Anelia Kudin. Implicit Agents in Ukrainian: Evidence from Retrieval Interference in Sentence Processing. M.A. Thesis, June, 2021.

2020

Steven Foley. Case, agreement, and sentence processing in Georgian. Ph.D. Dissertation, June, 2020.
Margaret Kroll. Comprehending ellipsis. Ph.D. Dissertation, June, 2020.
Jed Pizarro-Guevara. When human universal meets language specific. Ph.D. Dissertation, June, 2020.

2016

Nathan V. Arnett. Subject encodings & retrieval interference. Ph.D. Dissertation, December, 2016.
Chelsea Ann Miller. Limited, syntactic reactivation in noun phrase ellipsis. M.A. Thesis, June, 2016.

2015

Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt. The distribution and processing of referential expressions: evidence from English and Chamorro. M.A. Thesis, June, 2015.

2013

Adam Milton Morgan. Bridging the gap between acceptability and production of English resumptive pronouns. M.A. Thesis, June, 2013.

Research Areas

Syntax and memory management

A major question our lab focuses on is how complex compositional objects, like sentences, are bound in working memory. We try to make progress on this question by studying how linguistic features, and feature systems, can act as "traffic signals" to access recent memories via prediction and retrieval. Some representative publications:

Arnett, N., & Wagers, M. (2017). Subject encodings and retrieval interference. Journal of Memory and Language, 93, 22-54. 10.1016/j.jml.2016.07.005 Post-print (OSF)
Dillon, B., Andrews, C., Rotello, C. M., & Wagers, M. (2019). A new argument for co-active parses during language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45, 1271-1286. Preprint here: https://osf.io/qdmfh/. Repository for materials, data and analysis code.

Psycholinguistics outside the lab

My collaborators and I have focused on developing sentence processing research in smaller or lesser-studied languages. For the past several years, I've been investigating language processing in Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, together with Sandra Chung (UCSC) and Manuel F. Borja (Inetnun Åmut yan Kutturan Natibu, CNMI). Our research was supported by the NSF (2013-2016).

Wagers, M., Borja, M.F., & Chung, S. (2018) Grammatical licensing and relative clause parsing in a flexible word-order language. Cognition, 178, 207-221. Postprint. Experimental items, data, & supplementary materials.
Wagers, M., Borja, M.F., & Chung, S. (2015) The real-time comprehension of wh-dependencies in a Wh-Agreement language. Language, 91, 109-144. Postprint and 10.1353/lan.2015.0001 (publisher)
Competition among pronouns in Chamorro grammar and sentence processing. April, 2018 handout used at Pronouns in Competition workshop (UC Santa Cruz).
Wagers, M., Chung, S. In press. Language processing experiments in the field. In J. Sprouse (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax. Postprint.
Chung, S., Wagers, M. On the universality of intrusive resumption: Evidence from Chamorro and Palauan. Unpublished manuscript.

Other lab members have been approaching problems in language processing from the perspective of underinvestigated languages. Jed Pizarro-Guevara has been working on Tagalog language processing, focused on the predictive value of Voice in interpreting A-bar dependencies in Tagalog.

Pizarro-Guevara, J.S., Wagers, M. (2020). The predictive value of Tagalog voice morphology in filler-gap dependency formation. Front Psychol, 11, 517. 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00517. Open Access.

Since 2018 Maziar Toosarvandani and I have convened z/lab, on sentence processing Zapotec. This research, expanded to include comparative studies with Hebrew ,is now supported by the NSF (2020-2024; BCS), with Co-PI Ivy Sichel.

Pronouns over gaps in parsing? Relative clause parsing in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec. 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York, NY (Jan 6-9, 2019). With Steven Foley, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Kelsey Sasaki, Fe Silva Robles, & Maziar Toosarvandani. Slides.
Animate intruders. 33rd Annual Meeting of the CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, Amherst, MA (Mar 19-21, 2020). Slides

Experimental methods in linguistics

We're broadly interested in finding creative, useful new practices in the design and analysis of language experiments.

Dillon, B., & Wagers, M. In press. Acceptability with the tools of signal detection theory. In G. Goodall (Ed.) Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax. Preprint.: Using signal-detection theoretic tools, like ROC curve analysis, to draw conclusions about gradience in acceptability judgments. Preprint provides code and tutorials.
Morgan, A., & Wagers, M. (2018). English Resumptive Pronouns are More Common where Gaps are Less Acceptable. Linguistic Inquiry, 49, 861-876. Postprint: https://osf.io/nj2mq/.: Comparing acceptability and production measures of English resumptive pronouns.
Kroll, M., & Wagers, M. Is working memory sensitive to discourse status? Experimental evidence from responsive appositives. Poster presented at XPrag 2017, Cologne, Germany, Jun 21-23, 2017. Poster: https://osf.io/95hjq/.: Manipulating acceptability with Questions-under-Discussion (QUDs).
Anand, P., Andrews, C., Farkas, D., & Wagers, M. (2011). The exclusive interpretation of plural nominals in quantificational environments. In N. Ashton, A. Chereches, & D. Lutz (Eds.) Proceedings of. the 21st Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference. 176-196. Open Access.: Correlating measures of plural ex-/inclusitivity.

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Past Events

A new paper with first author Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara out in Glossa on the Austronesian extraction restriction in Tagalog.: A tale of two Tagalogs. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 9(1).; Combines fieldwork, experimental syntax and computational modeling to demonstrate that there are two kinds of (very similar) grammatical systems mixing among Tagalog speakers.
We started our Spencer Foundation sponsored research project Writing With ChatGPT: The Learning Promises and Perils of Co-Writing with Generative Models in College Linguistics Classes: Led by PI Pranav Anand and Co-PIs Hannah Hausman and Matt Wagers, together with graduate student researchers Jajaira Reynaga & Ruoqing Yao
Congratulations to Stephanie Rich and Lalitha Balachandran for defending their Ph.D. dissertations and to Duygu Demiray for defending their M.A. thesis!: Lalitha Balachandran. Memory knows its bounds: encoding contexts in sentence comprehension. Ph.D. Dissertation, September 2024.; Stephanie Rich. The features we use and the features we lose: encoding, maintenance and retrieval. Ph.D. Dissertation, June 2024.; Duygu Demiray. Processing covert dependencies: a study on Turkish Wh-in-situ. M.A. Thesis, June 2024.
Presentations of UCSC Psycholinguistics research at the 30th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference: AMLaP, September 4-7, 2024, Edinburgh: Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ with first author Duygu Demiray & Matthew Wagers.; Linguistic boundaries delineate contextual domains in memory with first author Lalitha Balachandran and Matt Wagers.; Effects of foil processing, decision-making, and initial attention in the Maze task with John Duff (Saarland), Pranav Anand, & Amanda Rysling.; Linguistic boundaries reduce encoding interference in temporal order memory with first authors Stephanie Rich (Concordia) & Lalitha Balachandran and Matt Wagers.; Deprioritizing linguistic material: The role of givenness on focus & filler-gap processing with Morwenna Hoeks (Osnabrück), Maziar Toosarvandani, & Amanda Rysling.; Animacy and long-distance pronominal anaphora in discourse: Evidence from the Maze with Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford), Pranav Anand & Amanda Rysling.; Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: evidence from topicalization with first authors Niko Webster, Matthew Kogan & Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University) and Matt Wagers & Ivy Sichel.
Presentations of our research at the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing: HSP2024, May 16-18, 2024, University of Michigan: Probing Facilitatory and Inhibitory Interference with English Ditransitives with first author Matthew Kogan & Matt Wagers.; Different structural boundaries have different effects on dependency resolution, with first authors Lalitha Balachandran & Jack Duff, Pranav Anand & Amanda Rysling.; Memory for violated expectations in semantic focus, with first authors Lalitha Balachandran & Morwenna Hoeks, John Boye-Lynn, Nick Van Handel, & Amanda Rysling.; Canonical Argument Alignment Modulates Gap, but not RP, Acceptability in English, with first author Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner, Ivy Sichel, Maziar Toosarvandani, & Matt Wagers.; Processing arguments in Korean nominal predicates, with first author Nikolas Webster, Hanyoung Byun & Matt Wagers.; Delayed structural prediction for relative clauses in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, a language with robust resumptive pronouns with first authors Jack Duff & Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Fe Silva Robles, Maziar Toosarvandani & Matt Wagers. [platform presentation]; Maybe now, not later: online processing of possibility and negation in adults and 2-year-olds, Maxime Tulling, Vishal Arvindam, and Ailís Cournane.
And from grad alumni:: Number, animacy, and individual variation in the processing of cataphora, Steven Foley, Byron Ahn, & Lauren Ackerman.; Interference effects in Tagalog reflexive processing: A visual world study, Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara & Brian Dillon.

(2023) Congratulations to Matthew Kogan and Elif Ulusoy for successfully defending their M.A. theses!: Matthew Kogan. Maintaining Syntactic Positions and Thematic Roles in Memory. M.A. Thesis, June 2023.; Elifnur Ulusoy. Connectivity and case effects in agreement attraction: The case of Turkish. M.A. Thesis, June 2023.
Presentations of our research at the 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing: HSP2023, March 9-11, 2023, University of Pittsburgh: Predictive parsing as a source for resumptive pronoun preference in Hebrew with first author Mandy Cartner (TAU), Ivy Sichel, & Maziar Toosarvandani.; The role of prediction in retrieval interference: The case of reflexive attraction, with first author Maayan Keshev (UMass) & Brian Dillon; Turkish relative clauses and the role of syntactic connectivity in agreement attraction, with first author Elifnur Ulusoy (UCSC)

Santa Cruz Linguistics at HSP2022

Anti-local anaphors in Telugu are subject to local antecedent interference, by Vishal Arvindam & Matt Wagers (plenary) Session recording
Preposition doubling errors elicited by dependency length but not verb complexity, by Richard Bibbs & Matt Wagers
Processing focus intervention structures in Mandarin, by Yaqing Cao and Jess Law
Use/Mention ambiguities in comprehension: Evidence from agreement attraction, by John Duff & Matt Wagers
Understanding words of negotiation in context, by Allison Nguyen & Jean E. Fox Tree
"It's alive!": Animacy-based structural expectations rapidly update with context, by Stephanie Rich, Lalitha Balachandran, John Duff, Matthew Kogan, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Nicholas Van Handel & Matt Wagers

Congratulations to Vishal Arvindam: One of two inaugural recipients of the Gibson/Federenko Young Scholar Awards, for "outstanding scientific work as a talk at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing"! His presentation, from HSP2022, was entitled Anti-local anaphors in Telugu are subject to local antecedent interference.; View a video recording of the talk.
Alignment, Reanalysis and Re-encoding, talk delivered at X-PPL 2022, University of Zurich, 12-13 September, 2022; & Cornell Linguistics, 3 November, 2022
⁂ Congrats to 2022 graduates Dr. Nick Van Handel and Ashley Ippolito (B.A.) ⁂
❖ We (virtually) hosted the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing: March 24-26, 2022! ❖
⁂ Congrats to 2021 graduates Drs. Jake Vincent, Tom Roberts, & Kelsey Sasaki; and Anelia Kudin, M.A.! ⁂
☄ ~~New in Winter 2021~~ Continuing in Spring 2022: r/lab: an occasional lab meeting on resumptive pronouns, nominal features and their interaction; co-convened with Ivy Sichel & Maziar Toosarvandani

Santa Cruz Linguistics at CUNY2021

Task influences on lexical underspecification: Insights from the Maze and SPR, by Jack Duff, Adrian Brasoveanu, & Amanda Rysling
Guiding Implicit Prosody with Delexicalized Melodies: Evidence from a Match/Mismatch Task, by Nick Van Handel, Matt Wagers, & Amanda Rysling
Singular vs. Plural Themselves: Evidence from the Ambiguity Advantage, by Nick Van Handel, Lalitha Balachandran, Stephanie Rich, & Amanda Rysling
Decomposing the focus effect: Evidence from reading, by Morwenna Hoeks, Maziar Toosarvandani, & Amanda Rysling.
Syntactic and semantic parallelism guides filler-gap processing in coordination, by Stephanie Rich & Matt Wagers (plenary session)

⁂ Congrats to 2020 Ph.D. graduates Drs. Steven Foley (Princeton), Margaret Kroll (Amazon), & Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara (UMass)! ⁂

⿻ New NSF Award "Animacy and resumption at the border of cognition and grammar" (BCS 2019804)

Project comparing the syntax and processing of resumptive pronouns in Zapotec & Hebrew. Press release.

Collaboration with UCSC linguists Maziar Toosarvandani (PI) and Ivy Sichel (Co-PI)

August 2020 - January 2024

⿻ New Paper (Sep 2020): On the universality of intrusive resumption: evidence from Chamorro and Palauan

Joint with Sandra Chung. Forthcoming in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. doi:10.1007/s11049-020-09493-9.

⿻ New Poster (Aug 2020): Which sentences do speakers favor? ROC analysis of d-linking in filler-gap integration.

Joint with Brian Dillon, presented at CEMS2020 (Aug 17-19, 2020).

Santa Cruz Linguistics at CUNY2020

Processing direct discourse: Duff, Anand, Brasoveanu, and Rysling
Prominence scales in Georgian sentence processing: Foley
Word order in Tagalog RC processing : Pizarro-Guevara
Encoding interference : Rich
Ambiguity, underspecification and the Maze task : Van Handel, Sasaki, Duff, Anand, Rysling and Sloggett (B.A., 2010)
Discourse representation structures in memory; Linguistic skill acquisition; & Voice mismatch in VP Ellipsis : Brasoveanu, et al.
Hand-generated v. auto-maze foils in the Maze task : Sloggett, Van Handel & Rysling;
Resumption and animacy : Wagers, incorporating on-going joint work with z/lab (Foley, Pizarro-Guevara, Sasaki, & Toosarvandani).

🏕 CAMP3: California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, October 26-27, 2019, at UC Santa Cruz
Language Diversity, Contact, and Change Workshop (14-16 June; University of Chicago Beijing Center), Tutorial Workshop on Signal Detection Theory for Syntactic Research
MAPLL-TCP-TL 2019 (27-28 July; Konan University)
CUNY2019 presentations from s/lab members: Ben-Meir & Van Handel on Clauses v. verbs in retrieval, Foley on Computing object agreement, Kroll on Evaluating truth, Rich on Structural prediction, Roberts & Bellik on Remembering prosody in discourse, Rysling on Predictive attention allocation, Rysling & Van Handel on Listeners' predictions of sentence lengths, Sasaki on Temporal comprehension in discourse, and Wagers on the Grammaticality Asymmetry.
The z/lab group presented their initial findings on Zapotec sentence comprehension at the LSA Annual Meeting (January 2019)
Pronouns in Competition workshop (UCSC; April 2018). ... Competition among pronouns in Chamorro grammar and sentence processing. April, 2018, handout (variants presented at AFLA25, Academia Sinica, May 2018). UCL Lectures (UCL Linguistics, May 2017).