Matt Wagers

Matt Wagers is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he serves as Faculty Director for Curriculum and Enrollment in the Division of Humanities (2025-2026). His research focuses on language processing, particularly the role of syntactic information in memory management, and spans experimental syntax, psycholinguistics, and cross-linguistic studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland (2008), supervised by Colin Phillips, and a B.A. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University (2003), with Certificates in Neuroscience and Linguistics.

Wagers teaches courses on psycholinguistics, experimental methods, and syntax. His work investigates how linguistic features guide memory access during sentence processing, with emphasis on interference effects, syntactic prediction, and the universality of parsing principles. Notable projects include studies on Chamorro and Tagalog syntax, Zapotec sentence processing, and the NSF-funded research on animacy and resumption. He collaborates extensively, mentoring over 30 graduate and undergraduate students, many of whom have contributed to groundbreaking studies in experimental syntax and psycholinguistics.

His lab, z/lab, explores sentence processing in under-researched languages, while his Spencer Foundation-funded project examines generative AI's impact on linguistics education. Recent grants include NSF support for cross-linguistic research (2020-2024) and a UCOP MRPI Planning Grant (2025-2027) on leveraging linguistic diversity to improve AI models. Wagers has supervised numerous dissertations and theses addressing topics like subject encodings, agreement attraction, and resumptive pronouns, reflecting his commitment to bridging theoretical linguistics and empirical research.