Amy Schafer

Amy Schafer is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research focuses on psycholinguistics, spoken language processing, and the interplay between prosody/intonation and information structure (e.g., given, new, and focused information). She investigates these phenomena across adult, child, native, non-native, and bilingual populations, primarily in English, Korean, Japanese, and Austronesian languages.

• Education: PhD, University of Massachusetts–Amherst

Her research extends to field psycholinguistics, particularly through the HALA Project, which examines early signs of language endangerment and attrition in heritage speakers. She co-founded the College of LLL’s Language Analysis and Experimentation Laboratories (LAE Labs) in 2001, providing facilities for experimental tasks like eye-tracking and discourse processing. Currently, she explores prosody, event structure, and referential processing in Japanese- and Korean-speaking English learners.

Professor Schafer teaches courses such as LING 412 (Introduction to Psycholinguistics), LING 640Y (Graduate Psycholinguistics), LING 632 (Experimental Methods), and seminars on psycholinguistics and eye-tracking methods.