Dr. Brian Dillon, PhD, June 2026 visiting scholar

Every year, UCalgary fosters international collaboration and academic exchange through its Visiting Scholars Program. This summer, from June 15-27, the Faculty of Arts is pleased to welcome Dr. Brian Dillon, PhD, to the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literature and Cultures.

Please join us for a rich evening of linguistics with Dr. Dillon’s talk, “Language Processing in Minds and Machines" on June 16 at Contemporary Calgary.

About Dr. Brian Dillon, PhD

Dr. Dillon is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in psycholinguistics. His research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie syntactic processing in typically developing adults, with a special interest in the relationship between grammatical structure and working memory processes.

Dillon investigates this topic in a variety of languages, seeking to understand how the grammar of a given language influences how linguistic input is processed in memory. He prioritizes gathering insights from typologically diverse languages, in addition to English, to understand both universal and language-specific aspects of language processing.

Dillon’s work uses a variety of experimental techniques, including eye-tracking-while-reading, visual world eye-tracking and electrophysiological measures. He has published widely in linguistics and cognitive science journals, including the Journal of Memory and Language, Open Mind, Glossa Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Cognition and Topics in Cognitive Science. He is now in his fourth year of service as a founding co-editor-in-chief of Glossa Psycholinguistics.