 Julie C. Sedivy

Julie C. Sedivy is a linguist and writer who studies how people understand and use language. Her account of her scientific work identifies a doctorate at the University of Rochester, research using eye tracking to study spoken comprehension, and subsequent teaching at Brown University. Her textbook writing presents psycholinguistics through connections between experimental findings and ordinary language use.^[ref]

She coauthored the 1995 study linking visual context to online interpretation of spoken instructions.^[ref] The methodological connection is useful: fixations timed against an unfolding utterance can distinguish interpretations that lead to the same eventual response. Such a measurement needs carefully chosen alternatives and contexts before it supports a claim about sentence comprehension.