Todd Ferretti

Todd Ferretti is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he directs the Language and Cognition Lab. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Psychology from the University of Western Ontario and B.Sc. degrees in Psychology and Biology from Acadia University.

His research examines cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension, including figurative language processing, event representation, and memory retrieval. Current projects investigate how world knowledge informs interpretation of literal/nonliteral language and how linguistic structures trigger event information retrieval.

His publications demonstrate consistent focus on temporal cognition and narrative processing, with methodologies integrating behavioral experiments and neurocognitive measures like Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). Recent work explores proverb comprehension, grammatical aspect effects, and mental simulation of events.

Awards include multiple NSERC research grants, a Canadian Foundation for Innovation equipment grant, and postdoctoral fellowships at UC San Diego. He has supervised over 20 graduate students in cognitive psychology research.

The Language and Cognition Lab investigates how conceptual knowledge influences language understanding and event representation, with specialized EEG equipment for neurolinguistic studies.