Katy Carlson

Education

• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (2003), Northwestern University
• Ph.D. in Linguistics (2001), University of Massachusetts Amherst
• B.A. in Linguistics (1995), Yale University

Teaching Specializations & Courses Taught

• Specialization: Linguistics
• ENG 205 - Language, Culture and Mind
• ENG 305 - Introduction to Linguistics
• ENG 315 - Structure of English
• ENG 393 - History of the English Language
• ENG 680 - Advanced Syntax
• ENG 685 - Psycholinguistics

Profile

Dr. Carlson teaches a range of introductory linguistics classes for undergraduates plus syntax and psycholinguistics within the English MA program. She believes that it is important for English students and future English teachers to understand more about how language works so as to appreciate the complexity of the system that we use.

Dr. Carlson specializes in studying how people understand spoken language, using the methods of cognitive psychology. She explores how prosody, or the tune and rhythm of language, affects sentence comprehension. Her research has been funded since 2013 by the NIH, which allows her to provide research opportunities for talented undergraduate students.

• Publishes regularly in journals such as "Language and Speech," the "Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology," and "Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience."
• Presents at psycholinguistics conferences such as the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing in the U.S. and Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing in Europe.