Professor E. Matthew Husband is Professor of Psycholinguistics in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics. He obtained his bachelors degrees in psychology and mathematics from Tennessee Technological University and his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 2010. He taught briefly at the University of Michigan – Flint, Brown University, and Michigan State University before taking a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology at the University of South Carolina in 2011. In 2012 he took up a university lectureship in psycholinguistics in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics.
His research investigates how the mind represents and uses meaning, asking what forms and formats meaningful representations take, how they are constructed, enriched, and inferred by speakers and comprehenders, and how they are encoded to, organized in, and retrieved from memory.
Qualifications
- Ph.D. in Linguistics with a Specialization in Cognitive Science (Michigan State University, Advisor: Marcin Morzycki)
- B.S. in Psychology (Tennessee Technological University)
- B.S. in Mathematics (Tennessee Technological University)
Selected work
Questions across the research programme
Thematic separation in light of sentence comprehension
Husband, E. M. · Language and Linguistic Compass · 2023
What does the grammatical representation of thematic relations commit us to when it comes to the processes that construct sentence meaning?
DOI
Nothing much for kinds
Husband, E. M. · For Hagit: A celebration · 2022
How is the kind/object distinction shaped by grammatical representation?
Open access
Relating word prediction and probability judgment: Online and offline probabilistic processes are partially shared
Zhang, Y. & Husband, E. M. · Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society · 2026
Do our explicit judgments about what is probable and our moment-to-moment expectations during comprehension draw on the same probabilistic representations and processes?
Open access
The impact of implicit scalar alternatives on the products of language comprehension: Evidence from recognition memory
Patson, N. & Husband, E. M. · Memory & Cognition · 2026
When the comprehension process makes implicit alternatives available, do those alternatives become part of the representation that persists in memory?
DOI
An incremental QUD approach to causal discourse expectations
Yao, R., Altshuler, D. & Husband, E. M. · Acta Psychologica · 2026
Can comprehenders’ expectations about what comes next be explained by the questions that become relevant as a discourse evolves?
DOI
Speaking of death
Husband, E. M. · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · 2018
What does the way we grammatically encoded events tell us about how events themselves are represented in the mind?
DOI
All publications available to view here.
Learn more about Matt on his personal website.
