• PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I am interested in the cognitive processes and mental representations necessary for people to effectively produce and comprehend language. I am especially interested in how language-users synthesize information from different levels of linguistic representation (e.g., semantic, syntactic, phonological) in order to produce or comprehend a message. My research makes use of computational and behavioral methods to investigate these questions.

Much of my research has focused on what speech and prosody — the rhythm, intonation, and intensity of speech — can reveal about language processing. In addition, ongoing projects explore how comprehenders treat messages that contain errors, how people represent words that have similar meanings, and what aphasias such as Auditory Verbal Agnosia reveal about the organization of language production and comprehension systems.

• Buxó-Lugo, A. & Slevc, L. R. (2024). Integration of input and expectations influences syntactic parses, not just sentence interpretation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 50(3), 500-508. 
• Li, L., Buxó-Lugo, A., Jacobs, C. L., & Slevc, L. R. (2024). Are lexical representations graded or discrete? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 77(5), 909-923. 
• Coretta, S., Casillas, J. V., Roessig, S., Franke, M., ..., Buxó-Lugo, A., ..., & Roettger, T. (2023). Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Sciences. 6(3). 
• Buxó-Lugo, A. & Kurumada, C. (2023). What changes when we tune into talker- specific prosody? University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences, 9(1). 
• Long, B., Simson, J., Buxó-Lugo, A. Watson, D. G., & Mehr, S. A. (2023). How games can make behavioural science better (Commentary). Nature, 613 (7944), 433-436.
• Buxó-Lugo, A. & Slevc, L. R. (2021). Do minor thirds characterize the prosody of sad speech? Auditory Perception & Cognition.
• Xie, X., Buxó-Lugo, A. & Kurumada, C. (2021). Encoding and decoding of meaning through structured variability in intonational speech prosody. Cognition, 211.
• Buxó-Lugo, A., Jacobs, C. L., & Watson, D. G. (2020). The world is not enough to explain lengthening of phonological competitors. Journal of Memory and Language, 110.
• Watson, D. G., Jacobs, C. L., & Buxó-Lugo, A. (2019). Prosody indexes both competence and performance. WIREs Cognitive Science.
• Buxó-Lugo, A., Toscano, J. C., & Watson, D. G. (2018). Effects of participant engagement on prosodic prominence. Discourse Processes, 55(3), 305-323. DOI:10.1080/0163853X.2016.1240742
• Buxó-Lugo, A. & Watson, D. G. (2016). Evidence for the influence of syntax on prosodic parsing. Journal of Memory and Language, 90, 1-13. DOI:10.1016/j.jml.2016.03.001
• Watson, D. G., Buxó-Lugo, A., & Simmons, D. C. (2015). The effect of phonological encoding on word duration: Selection takes time. In E. Gibson and L. Frazier, Explicit and implicit prosody in sentence processing (pp. 85-98). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-12961-7_5
• Toscano, J. C., Buxó-Lugo, A., & Watson, D. G. (2015). Using game-based approaches to increase level of engagement in research and education. In S. Dikkers (Ed.), TeacherCraft: Using Minecraft for teaching and learning (pp. 139-151). Pittsburgh: ETC Press.