Matt Wagers
assistant professor | department of linguistics | uc santa cruz
psycholinguistics, language comprehension, memory, experimental syntax
mwagers (at) ucsc (dot) edu
231 Stevenson College
(831) 824-4285
Office hours: Tues 4-5pm and by appointment (Spring '13)
linguistics labs | lab meeting schedule | meeting mailing list | fb

teaching

Spring '13
LING158 Adv. Psycho: Ellipsis
LING257 Graduate psycholinguistics

Fall '13
LING257 Graduate psycholinguistics

Winter '14
LING157 Undergraduate psycholinguistics
LING258 Advanced graduate psycholinguistics

course archive

research

Google Scholar Page

downloadable papers

Chamorro Psycholinguistics na Project

Plural Semantics @ UCSC

mendeley (reference sharing)


verbatim memory

almost work

Speech errors, unusual syntax

not work
last.fm

☄ NEW
The real-time comprehenison of wh-dependencies in a Wh-Agreement language
with Sandra Chung & Manuel F. Borja, May 2013.
Processing covert dependencies: an SAT study on Mandarin Wh-in-situ questions
with Ming Xiang (lead), Brian Dillon, Fengqin Liu & Taomei Guo, March 2013.
Accepted, Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
Obama, resumptive pronouns and verbatim memory, a Twitter mini-experiment
Reflexive anaphora, similarity-based retrieval interference and the focus of attention
Do reflexives always find a good antecedent for themselves?
with Joseph King & Caroline Andrews [poster presented at CUNY25, March 2012]
Islands don't reflect WM constraints
A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects
with Jon Sprouse & Colin Phillips, Language (March 2012 issue)
And Working memory capacity and island effects: a reminder of the issues and the facts
(A reply to commentary generated by our first article; first comment, second comment)

hello

My research and instruction asks questions about the mental data structures of syntactic representation and the interface between language structure and memory. For example:

An important current research project is incremental comprehension in Chamorro. Chamorro is a verb-initial Austronesian language with an intricately interacting system of movement, case, and agreement. My collaborators and I are investigating how syntax-morphology interactions impact the comprehender's expectations and how different sources of expectation guide early interpretation. This forms part of an effort to increase the contribution to psycholinguistic theory made by 'small' languages. We conduct our research in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. With: Sandra Chung (UCSC) and Manuel F. Borja (Inetnon Åmot yan Kutturan Natibu, CNMI; [photo]). Our research is supported by the NSF (Award #1251429).

I've also worked on appropriate methods for eliciting judgments in semantics/pragmatics experiments (joint work with Pranav Anand, & Donka Farkas).

background

training
2009: Post-doc, New York University, advisor: Brian McElree
2008: Ph.D., Linguistics, Maryland, advisor: Colin Phillips
2003: A.B. (Honors), Molecular biology (Neuroscience), Princeton, advisor: Sam Wang
1999: Diploma, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

collaborators
Pranav Anand, Sandy Chung, Brian Dillon, Donka Farkas, Ellen Lau
Brian McElree, Colin Phillips, Jon Sprouse, Ming Xiang, Masha Polinsky
Nate Arnett, Adam Morgan, Joseph King, Caroline Andrews