Position Title
Associate Professor
About
Dr. Laurie Lawyer is a psycholinguist who specializes in how the brain perceives and integrates information about word forms. She joined the Linguistics department at UC Davis in 2024.
Research Focus
Dr. Lawyer's research primarily addresses the way in which linguistic input shapes lexical perception, and what relationship this has to models of lexical access and lexical storage. In this research, she is guided by theoretical work in phonology and morphology, which can incisively highlight structures that challenge our understanding of how words are stored or processed.
As director of the L+PLUS Lab, she uses a variety of methodologies (including in-person and online behavioral tasks, eye-tracking, and EEG) to shed light on questions about language processing more broadly construed, including changes across the lifespan and in diverse linguistic populations. This includes research on how school-aged children process different accents and grammatical structures, how adult first- and second-language users process complex morphological forms and syntactic structures in real time, and the impact of aging on the linguistic system. Other than English, she has looked at various aspects of language processing in French, Kinyarwanda, Mandarin, British Sign Language, and American Sign Language.
- Dr. Lawyer teaches courses in psycholinguistics, phonology, morphology, and language acquisition.