I am Professor of Psychology & Human Development at Vanderbilt University. My area of research is language and memory, or psycholinguistics, and I specialize in the study of conversation, including perspective-taking, conversational pragmatics, and reference. Here is a link to my CV.
A core focus of my work is the cognitive mechanisms of how we represent the knowledge and perspectives of the people we interact with. Some of my early research examines how these representations are used during online language processing (Brown-Schmidt, et al., 2005; 2008). More recently I have begun examining how linguistic processes that operate in the moment shape enduring representations of language in memory over time (Lord & Brown-Schmidt 2022). A new theoretical proposal (Heller & Brown-Schmidt, 2023) argues that in conversation, we form separate representations of one’s own mental state, of one’s partner, and compare the two to identify epistemic advantages and disadvantages. Our theory is that assertion requires representing that you have information your partner lacks, whereas asking a question requires representing that your partner has information you lack, and that forming these representations impacts how we remember our communicative interactions. Ongoing empirical work tests these predictions.
While many findings demonstrate considerable sensitivity to what other people know and how they talk, how we remember conversation paints a very different picture. In studies of conversational memory using both recognition and recall procedures, I demonstrate that people remember significantly more of what they said themselves compared to what was said to them (McKinley, et al., 2017; Yoon, et al., 2016; Brown-Schmidt, et al., 2023; 2024). This egocentric bias in conversation memory likely shares cognitive origins with the well-known generation effect in memory research (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). Further, the quantity of information exchanged in conversation that can be accurately recalled in detail is between 5%-40% of what was said even after brief delays; this finding has clear translational impacts in legal settings (Brown-Schmidt & Benjamin, 2018). Even when the gist of what was said is recalled, people may mis-recall who said it (a source error) and may mis-recall sentence form (e.g., confusing an assertion for a question). These findings are relevant to hearsay doctrine as correctly applying the hearsay rule requires identifying the speaker and sentence form of the statement in question (Provenzano & Brown-Schmidt, forthcoming). Ongoing empirical work is identifying and filling knowledge gaps in the empirical literature with direct relevance for law.
The third major thrust of my career is my long-term collaboration with Melissa Duff probing the impact of brain injury and neurodegenerative disease on language processing in real time and in rich contexts. A continuous thread through our work is understanding the contributions of declarative memory to language use in every-day contexts. Ongoing work examines the impact of moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) on language processing in every-day contexts (Clough, et al., 2024; 2025; Lord, et al., 2024; 2026) and for legally relevant language (Mitchell, et al., 2024). The emerging picture of our work is that cognitive-communication disorders following TBI are due, in part, to impairments in basic linguistic processes including use of definite reference and processing of co-reference. Ongoing work aims to further specify the impact of TBI on language use in context, and individual differences in outcome.
Read more about my research, including our work in the media. Learn more about my lab here. If you are interested in applying to work in my lab, look here. For most recent projects, find links to the raw data on my CV next to the paper citation; for some older projects look here for the data.
For information about my teaching look here.