Maria Fernanda Ferreira (born 22 September 1960) is a cognitive psychologist known for empirical investigations in psycholinguistics and language processing. Ferreira is Professor of Psychology at University of California, Davis.[1]
Fernanda Ferreira | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Professor of Psychology |
| Spouse | John Henderson |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Manitoba; University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of California, Davis |
| Website | Ferreira Lab |
In 1995, Ferreira was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology for cognition and human learning by the American Psychological Association.[2] She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science,[3] the Cognitive Science Society,[citation needed] and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).[citation needed]
Biography
editFerreira received her BA (Honours) in Psychology from the University of Manitoba in 1982. She went on to complete postgraduate work at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, obtaining degrees in Linguistics (MA 1986) and Psychology (MS 1985, PhD 1988). At U Mass Amherst. Ferreira worked under the supervision of Charles (Chuck) Clifton, Jr investigating relationships between syntactic processing and phonology. Her dissertation, "Planning and Timing in Sentence Production: The Syntax-to-Phonology Conversion," provided evidence that phonological structures and representations, rather than syntactic structures, impact the timing of sentence-level speech.[4]
Ferreira was previously an editor of Collabra: Psychology, an open-access psychology journal published by the University of California Press,[5] and is currently a co-Editor-in-Chief of Glossa Psycholinguistics.[6]
She is married to John Henderson, a collaborator and fellow professor at the University of California, Davis. Her brother, Victor Ferreira, is also a psycholinguist, and a Professor at the University of California, San Diego.[5]
Research
editFerreira's research investigates the processes allowing for efficient comprehension and production of speech. One such theoretical contribution to the is the Good Enough theory of sentence processing, which posits that listeners, when processing linguistic input, engage in satisficing rather than constructing detailed representations. That is, the language processing system develops partial or superficial representations, which are "good enough" for the task they are meant to perform.[7]
Further, these representations, which may be inaccurate when dealing with difficult input (e.g. garden path sentences), may persist after syntactic reanalysis. Ferreira's work on comprehension errors in adults reading passive sentences further supports the Good Enough model.[8] This model of syntactic representation challenged the theories that held that sentence processing mechanisms generated fully complete and accurate representations.[7][9]
One of Ferreira's methodological contributions is the auditory moving-window[2] technique, which was used to assess influences of prosody,[10] lexical frequency, and syntactic complexity[11] in spoken-language comprehension.
References
edit- ^ "Fernanda Ferreira — People in the Social Science Departments at UC Davis". psychology.ucdavis.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
- ^ a b "APA Distinguished Scientific Awards for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology". www.apa.org. Retrieved 2021-03-16.
- ^ "Association for Psychological Science: APS Fellows". www.psychologicalscience.org. Archived from the original on 2018-05-20. Retrieved 2021-03-16.
- ^ Ferreira, Maria Fernanda (1988). Planning and timing in sentence production: The syntax-to-phonology conversion (Thesis). ProQuest 303594196.
- ^ a b "Collabra: Psychology Editor Spotlight". 13 September 2017.
- ^ "Editorial Board". Glossa Psycholinguistics.
- ^ a b Ferreira, Fernanda; Bailey, Karl G.D.; Ferraro, Vittoria (February 2002). "Good-Enough Representations in Language Comprehension". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 11 (1): 11–15. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00158. S2CID 4126375.
- ^ Ferreira, F (September 2003). "The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences". Cognitive Psychology. 47 (2): 164–203. doi:10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00005-7. PMID 12948517. S2CID 3863800.
- ^ Engelhardt, Paul E.; Ferreira, Fernanda; Jones, Manon W. (2009). "Good Enough Language Processing: A Satisficing Approach". Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 31 (31).
- ^ Ferreira, Fernanda; Anes, Michael D.; Horine, Matthew D. (March 1996). "Exploring the use of prosody during language comprehension using the auditory moving window technique". Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 25 (2): 273–290. doi:10.1007/BF01708574. PMID 8667299. S2CID 31551267.
- ^ Ferreira, Fernanda; Henderson, John M.; Anes, Michael D.; Weeks, Phillip A.; McFarlane, David K. (March 1996). "Effects of lexical frequency and syntactic complexity in spoken-language comprehension: Evidence from the auditory moving-window technique". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 22 (2): 324–335. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.22.2.324.
External links
edit- Faculty homepage at the University of California, Davis
- Fernanda Ferreira publications indexed by Google Scholar