Lee Osterhout

University of Washington

Lee Osterhout received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Tufts University in 1990. After a year of post-doctoral work at Northwestern University he moved to the University of Washington, where he is currently Professor of Psychology and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language lab. Dr. Osterhout’s primary research method involves recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while people read or listen to language. He was the first to show that syntactic and semantic anomalies elicit distinct ERP responses. Subsequently, he has used these language-sensitive ERP effects to study real-time language processing in native speakers and language learners.