Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He specializes in psycholinguistics, the study of how adults and children understand, produce, and acquire language. In particular, his research seeks to understand how adult native speakers of a language make use of their cognitive resources, such as attention or memory, when interpreting language. To study this, he makes use of experimental methodologies such as eye-tracking while reading, and computational models of human cognition. In his work, he has investigated the real-time comprehension and acquisition of of English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Inuktitut and Turkish, and he has studied the morphosyntax of Modern Irish. 

At UMass Amherst, Professor Dillon teaches courses on experimental psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and quantitative data analysis at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He also directs the Cognitive Science of Language laboratory in the Linguistics Department.