Fernanda Ferreira

With lots of new people and followers, thought I’d give my bio: I’m 2-times an immigrant (🇵🇹—>🇨🇦, 🇨🇦—>🇺🇸), grew up in Winnipeg, 1st-gen. I’m a prof at UCDavis where I study language processing and teach amazing students. Love progressive politics, science, commuter cycling, running, and Jane Austen.

I am pleased to announce the launch of our new diamond open access journal Psychology Across Development (accepting submissions starting today!). We are a lifespan developmental journal. (1/3) escholarship.org/uc/psycdev

We're excited to announce the publication of 'Comprehending unproduced structures: Mainstream US English users’ processing of English negative concord' by Lukyanenko & Blanchette, available here: escholarship.org/uc/item/3d95...

delighted to share my review article, out now in Trends in Cognitive Sciences! i have been thinking a lot about dynamics lately. this article outlines three key principles - persistence, parallelism, and time-stamped encoding - that support human speech comprehension 🧠✨🌀

We're excited to announce the publication of 'Readers can recognise multiple words at a glance but out of order: Evidence from transposed word effects in Japanese' by Kondo & Yano, available here: escholarship.org/uc/item/1jd2...

Calls: Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics - "Special Issue: Pitch at the Language-Music Interface" (Jrnl)

New preprint: In Ukrainian, several approximating devices can stack on a single numeral, and the result conveys the same interval as one device alone. I argue that a numeral introduces the resolutions it can be read at, and that approximators operate on that set the way indefinites and definites do.

Super cool paper by my student @pkuchmiichuk.com that synthesizes Dylan Bumford and @simoncharlow.com's work on effect-driven interpretation with probabilistic dynamic semantics to understand how slack regulators like "exactly" and "approximately" work.

What’s missing: 1/ Any framing about what higher is or has been that misses the big public investment post-WW2 and then massive disinvestment starting in the 1980s which spirals into rising costs and student debt is disingenuous at best. 5/

After reading some of the recent pubs and discourse around US higher ed.… I should just stop right here. But here are the three major fallacies of much of what’s out there, three contexts that are missing, and the one big thing that is driving me around the bend (actually already there, but). 1/

I made a mistake. And because of that mistake, I no longer have confidence that results that I reported in several research papers are an accurate reflection of replication rates. 1/

📣 New study out today! We show that the brain's language network stays remarkably stable with age — same topography, lateralization, selectivity and connectivity as in younger adults — while the domain-general multiple demand network showed altered activity patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.tiktok.com/@hulu/video/...

My view on the train ride from Berkeley to Davis.

Absolutely vile framing from the @nytimes.com. Why doesn’t this leave behind hard questions for the media that hounded him? Or the global right-wing that gleefully turned a local matter into an international incident?

Many of you will have seen the recent post about changes at OSF. If you'd like to learn more about how to use other services (particularly Zenodo) to share data and code, see my book chapter on resource sharing. bettercode-book.org/book-sharing...

Why do we breeze through some sentences, but others make us slow down and reread? A popular answer is predictability: unexpected words are harder to process. In our new @pnas.org article, we used LMs as models of human prediction to ask how far this explanation can actually go🧵

As always, we are powered by the Janeway systems platform, hosted by @escholarship.bsky.social of the University of California, copyedited and typeset by our production team Sandy Chung, @fernandaedi.bsky.social and Silicon Chips, and supported by the psycholinguistics community!

And next up is 'Too many tokens: Modeling lexical effects in corpora' by Gahl & Baayen. Read it here: escholarship.org/uc/item/4315...

We're on a roll! So happy to announce two more articles in Glossa Psycholinguistics. First up is 'Processing efficiency constraints on relative clause extraposition in German: Evidence from speeded judgments and production' by Córtes Rodríguez & Felser. Read it here: escholarship.org/uc/item/2bj7...

This seems to me to be an absolutely earth-shattering finding. Incredible work.

New paper in #ScienceAdvances! 10 ECoG patients performed 3 language production tasks: word, word list, and sentence production. We found surprising dissociations between how active cortical sites were and whether they encoded linguistic information: 🧵 [1/9] doi.org/10.1126/scia... @science.org

As an adaptation of Homer’s epic, the Honda Odyssey is a complete disaster. With its roomy cabin and rear entertainment system for the kids, the minivan foregrounds concerns that only arose with the American nuclear family and say nothing about the brutality that underlay the Bronze Age.

This cartoon from The New Yorker made me laugh out loud and grimace a little.

Excited to share a preprint of work done in collaboration with @emilynguist.bsky.social ! osf.io/preprints/ps... TLDR: some effect sizes are larger in lab than on web-based platforms. So when evaluating quantitative predictions, considering the testing platform can be important! 1/n

As always, we are powered by the Janeway systems platform, hosted by @escholarship.bsky.social of the University of California, copyedited and typeset by our production team Sandy Chung, @fernandaedi.bsky.social and Silicon Chips, and supported by the psycholinguistics community!

... and next up we have 'Crossover as an early filter to pronoun resolution in English' by Lyu, Yin, and Kaiser: escholarship.org/uc/item/31m0...

We're excited to announce the publication of two more articles in Glossa Psycholinguistics! First up is 'How to understand silence: Voice mismatches in ellipsis in English' by Bruening, Koppy, Palaz, Tomioka and Tollan. Read it here: escholarship.org/uc/item/4jb2...

Aarabi, M.H. Neuroimaging runs on helium, helium runs through Hormuz. Nat Neurosci 29, 1777–1778 (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Haley Stevens's accent has people talking. Is it really a Michigan accent? (spoiler: yes. It really is - tho see the note below) I had fun talking with the New York Times about one of my very specific niches of expertise (Michigan English). www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/u...

It's summer publishing season at GPx 😎🏖️ So happy to announce the publication of 'The prosodic perception‐production link: Impact of auditory‐perceptual acuity on prosodic cue production under cognitive load' by Hofmann, Tuomainen, Hanne, Veríssimo & Wartenburger: escholarship.org/uc/item/7n54...

If p < 0.05, you "reject the null." That's what many stats courses teach you to do. This week's Experimentology chapter argues that this binary, dichotomous frame can sometimes be useful but is the wrong default for psych experiments — there is a broader toolkit available! 🧵 experimentology.io

🥳New paper from the #ERC ‘LaDy’ project! link.springer.com/article/10.3... We had people categorize words alone vs. in pairs and observed that social interaction made abstract words more concrete. @cnrs-dr12.bsky.social @cnrs.fr @erc.europa.eu @univ-amu.fr @ilcb.bsky.social 🧵1/4

As always, we are powered by the Janeway systems platform, hosted by @escholarship.bsky.social of the University of California, copyedited and typeset by our production team Sandy Chung, @fernandaedi.bsky.social and Silicon Chips, and supported by the psycholinguistics community!

We're delighted to announce the publication of a new article in Glossa Psycholinguistics! Now available is 'Morphological variation and priming in Hungarian spontaneous dialogue' by Rácz. Get it here: escholarship.org/uc/item/0jp5...

This news gutted me. I don’t won’t go into details, but Raul was publicly, bravely KIND to me at a very low point in my professional life when so others were cowardly, weak, and mean. He owed me nothing. He gave because he wanted to. A rare occurrence in my life. jovanevery.co.uk/in-memoriam-...

As always, we are powered by the Janeway systems platform, hosted by @escholarship.bsky.social of the University of California, copyedited and typeset by our production team Sandy Chung, @fernandaedi.bsky.social and Silicon Chips, and supported by the psycholinguistics community!

We're delighted to announce the publication of a new article in Glossa Psycholinguistics! Now available is 'Processing of Russian and Czech polar questions: Evidence for the effect of question bias' by Razguliaeva, Onoeva, Šimík, Meyer, and Hrdinková. Get it here: escholarship.org/uc/item/09g3...

This is the list of candidates for governor of California.

I have news: starting July 1, I'm a retiree! To help me sort out my feelings and plans, I've started a blog. If you're interested, here's my first post: sabbaticalforever2026.blogspot.com/2026/05/fern...

imagine being an elite university or major newspaper or an elected member of Congress and realizing that you don't have the moral backbone of, to quote this marvelous post, a group popular 40 years ago and best known for lip syncing and also one of them is dead.

It speaks so badly of our attention economy that John Fetterman is the topic of endless conversation for being an unhinged jerk, while Andy Kim from right next door gets such little hype for being a decent human being

New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6

Aside from testing the MR view, we offer a new theoretical take on why kids fail. Kids conceptualize the goal of object retrieval tasks exactly as adults do betting. When we bet on horses, we don't spread bets across all options, but try to pick a winner. When FORCED to spread bets, kids succeed.

Cubans are starving and have gone weeks without electricity and clean water due to Trump's blockade of any oil reaching the island. Here's why we aren't covering this.

Excited to share I will be joining UC Davis as an assistant professor starting July 2027! Thank you dearly to all mentors and friends who have supported me over the years ❤️ and Cal Poly friends, I'll miss you!

We've ironed out our bugs and are back to publishing great science :D We're delighted to announce the publication of 'Don’t overthink! Round number expressions are interpreted sharp' by Katzir & Ariel! escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb7...

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

Now out, open access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....