Fernanda Ferreira

Fernanda Ferreira is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and Principal Investigator of the Ferreira Lab. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Glossa Psycholinguistics.

• Ph.D., Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1988)
• M.A., Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1986)
• M.S., Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1985)
• B.A., Psychology, University of Manitoba, Canada (1982)

Professor Ferreira's research spans psycholinguistics, focusing on how formal linguistic theories inform language processing mechanisms. Her work integrates behavioral and neural measures, including eye-tracking (fixations, saccades, pupil diameter) and ERPs, to explore real-time language comprehension and production, prosody, disfluency, and individual differences.

Her recent publications analyze prosody in human-AI interaction, working memory in bilingualism, ERP studies on disfluency, visual attention in language production, and cross-linguistic syntactic processing. Key themes include cognitive load, syntactic ambiguity, and the interplay between language and other cognitive systems.

Scientific Honors and Awards:

• 1996 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology
• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Fellow, Cognitive Science Society
• Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)
• Fellow, Association for Psychological Science (APS)

She teaches cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, language production/comprehension, and prosody and disfluency at UC Davis. The Ferreira Lab investigates how language processing interacts with memory, vision, and action, with a focus on syntactic theory and experimental methods.