Teenie Matlock

Teenie Matlock (born 1958) is a cognitive scientist known for research that focuses on the meaning of everyday language and the extent to which context influences this meaning. Her research has deepened understanding of the impact of language and communication in cognition and politics, as well as climate science. She recently retired and now holds the position of Professor Emerita of Cognitive Science at University of California, Merced.

Teenie Matlock received the 2015–2016 Senate Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentorship at UC Merced for successful mentoring of faculty and creating a positive environment for faculty to be successful. Her contributions as a leader and community builder were again recognized in 2021, when she received the Athena Award for Academic Leadership from CITRIS Women in Tech Initiative Her family ancestry includes Native American heritage, from the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, from both her mother's and father's sides, as well as lineage tracing back to Gold Rush miners. In 1976, she graduated from Mariposa High School. None of her family at that point had attended college.

Matlock began her post-secondary education as a first generation student at Fresno City College Working under the supervision of Raymond Gibbs, Jr., her dissertation research focused on how fictive motion figurative language that uses motion verbs with nouns that do not typically move (e.g., "A road crosses the street"), is understood.

Career Matlock did her postdoctoral research at Stanford University, where she continued her work on fictive motion. In 2004, she became a founding faculty member at the University of California, Merced where she and Jeff Yoshimi worked closely together to design the first Cognitive Science undergraduate courses and determine the structure and requirements for the Cognitive Science major. As part of her work to develop a highly reputable Cognitive Science Department at UC Merced, she applied for and received a National Science Foundation grant that allowed her to host a 2009 conference at UC Merced on the "Future of Cognitive Science." She currently serves on the editorial board of Metaphor and Symbol, a journal focused on the study of metaphor and other figurative devices in language.

Matlock has also worked to support the interests of Native Americans in her community. She has been an active participant of the American Indian Council of Mariposa County and has worked to forge connections between UC Merced and the local native population. She helped to create the Toloma 5K Run and designed Toloma Grove as a place on the UC Merced campus for reflection in honor of Native American people. In June 2023, she spoke at a Mariposa County Board of Supervisors Meeting in support of the Mariposa Gateway Elements Project to recognize the Miwuk people with physical structures in town.

Matlock has also continued to play trumpet. She performed with the G Street Revolution, a UC Merced faculty band, in 2017 and has played Taps at the closing portion of the Memorial Day Service in Mariposa in 2024.

Research

Matlock's research on fictive motion has demonstrated that the way we process this type of figurative language is comparable to the way we process and engage in actual motion. Matlock's subsequent research demonstrated that engaging with fictive motion sentences influences people's understanding of time. Matlock has examined the impact of using different verb forms to describe a fictional political candidate's past actions on potential voters' attitudes, e.g., whether study participants think a politician with a problematic past would be reelected and how confident they were in that assessment. In this work, Matlock demonstrated that participants had a less favorable view of a candidate's negative behavior when these past actions were described with verbs of the form was verb+ing as opposed to verb+ed. For example, participants who read about the politician who last year was having an affair with his assistant and was taking hush money from a prominent constituent were significantly more confident in their belief that he would not be reelected in comparison to those respondents that read last year this politician had an affair with his assistant and took hush money from a prominent constituent. Additionally, participants in the was verb+ing condition gave higher estimates of the amount of hush money the politician took than respondents estimated in the verb+ed condition. Matlock also found that messages containing information about a candidate's negative and positive past behaviors were viewed less favorably when the negative behavior was expressed in the was verb+ing form and the positive behavior was expressed in the verb+ed form, as compared to when the conditions were reversed. The findings are particularly relevant when considering how the use of language may influence voters' perceptions of a political candidate and their voting preferences. Similarly, her studies of the use of war or race metaphors to describe climate change showed that using a war metaphor made people more attuned to the urgency and risk associated with climate change than the use of a race metaphor.

Representative publications