Shota Momma

Shota Momma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, serving as TA Coordinator. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, a B.S. in Psychology, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms underlying sentence production and comprehension, particularly the interaction between syntax and psycholinguistics. He runs the Grammar And Processing (GAP) lab, where he investigates real-time sentence structure assembly in languages like English and Japanese using EEG, eye-tracking, and computational modeling. Current projects explore dependency planning, cross-linguistic production differences, and the role of grammatical constraints in spoken language.

His academic background includes an Associate of Arts from Pierce College, Fort Steilacoom. Research interests span psycholinguistics, syntax, bilingual processing (especially Japanese/English), and experimental methods. He teaches courses on psycholinguistics, research methods, and syntax.

Lab members include graduate students Erika Mayer (Semantics/Psycholinguistics) and Michael Wilson (Syntax/Production), along with multiple undergraduates working on syntax, computational linguistics, and sentence processing. No scientific awards are explicitly listed in the provided texts, though his prolific publication record since 2014 indicates active research engagement.

His work often addresses the timing and mechanisms of verb selection, dependency formation during production, and the relationship between syntactic structure and real-time processing. Major themes include how speakers mentally represent grammatical structures and how these representations influence speech generation and comprehension accuracy.