Lyn Frazier

Lyn Frazier is an experimental linguist, focusing on psycholinguistic research of adult sentence comprehension. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was named the first Distinguished Graduate Mentor at University of Massachusetts and received an award from the University of Massachusetts system for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity. She is co-editor of the book series Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, published by Springer.

Frazier received her PhD in 1978 from the University of Connecticut under the supervision of Janet Dean Fodor, on the subject of parsing strategies in syntax.

Frazier's work has examined how listeners approach the task of processing the incoming language stream. She has proposed and refined syntactic parsing models, including a two-tier parsing system, the garden path model, and the Active Filler Hypothesis. Her recent work has focused on how listeners parse ellipsis.