William S. Horton (Sid)

William S. Horton (Sid) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 2005 and directed the Cognition and Communication Lab (Cresap 108). Starting in September 2025, he will serve as Chair of the Department of Linguistics. His research focuses on socio-cognitive mechanisms in language use, particularly discourse pragmatics, perspective-taking, and non-literal language processing.

• Education: B.S. in Psychology/German from Duke University (1991), M.A. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from University of Chicago (1994/1999)
• Previous roles: Postdoctoral research at SUNY-Stony Brook, Cognitive Aging at Georgia Tech

Research trends from his 20+ years of publications include common ground, memory processes, figurative language, and age-related communication changes. His work increasingly incorporates computational text analysis and real-time digital communication studies.

Awards:

• Fellow, Society for Text and Discourse

Students: Supervised Ph.D. theses on conversational alignment, common ground activation, and digital communication. Undergraduate honors projects explore inhibitory deficits, speech internalization, and perspective-taking in bilingualism.

Cognition and Communication Lab investigates language processing in spoken/written contexts using experimental methods and computational models.