Duane Watson

Duane Girard Watson (born 1976) is an American neuroscientist and professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. He holds the Frank W. Mayborn Chair in Cognitive Science and leads the Vanderbilt University Communication and Language Laboratory.

Early life and education Watson is from Las Vegas. Watson studied psychology at Princeton University. He originally intended to be a physician, but a class on linguistics made him change course. He graduated in 1998 and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here he joined the laboratory of Ted Gibson in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002 Watson earned his doctoral degree. His research considered intonational phrasing (that is, sections of spoken text with a particular intonation patterns) in language comprehension. Watson was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester, where he worked with Michael Tanenhaus.

Research and career He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2005, where he established a laboratory that investigates the cognitive processes that underpin language and nonverbal communication. He has studied how gesture and emphasis influence long-term communication. This includes analysing how disfluencies impact listener's interpretation of speakers' intentions.

Academic service Watson was appointed chair-elect of the governing board of the Psychonomic Society in 2019. He serves as associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He was promoted to Frank W. Mayborn Chair in 2020.

Select publications

Personal life Watson is married with four children.