Hugh Rabagliati, Ph.D. (2010-2012)

How are word meanings different from concepts? How is efficient sentence comprehension achieved? And what happens when it breaks down? My research uses methods and techniques from psycholinguistics, development and cognitive neuroscience to illuminate issues in semantic interpretation that are not amenable to traditional tools, and to test how higher-level linguistic information is used to make predictions about, and guide processing at, lower levels of representation. I assessed these questions across a variety of populations, including adults, children and patients. In the lab, I used eye-tracking to study how individuals with schizophrenia integrate top-down and bottom-up information during sentence processing. I worked as a post-doc with Jesse Snedeker (Harvard) and Gina Kuperberg. Prior to arriving in Boston, I received a B.A. from Oxford and a Ph.D from NYU, and was then a post-doc at Brown. I am now working as a Chancellor's Fellow in the Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh.