Matthew Husband

Matthew Husband is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow at St. Hugh's College. His research focuses on the syntax-semantics interface and language processing, employing behavioral and neurophysiological methods such as acceptability judgments, eye-tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He leads the Language and Brain Laboratory, investigating how sentence meanings are composed and represented in the brain.

His work bridges theoretical linguistics with experimental psychology, exploring questions like the neural mechanisms supporting sentence meaning composition and the cognitive processes underlying real-time language processing. Key areas include probabilistic prediction in language comprehension, event semantics, and the role of context in meaning construction. Recent studies address topics such as topichood effects, scalar implicatures, and the dissociation between prediction and integration processes in neural language networks.

Matthew’s contributions span over 30 peer-reviewed articles, with a focus on methodological rigor and cross-disciplinary approaches. His research has been supported by the Language and Brain Lab infrastructure at Oxford, emphasizing collaborative work with neuroscientists and computational modelers.