I am a Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics. I was full-time faculty at UMD from 2000-2023. Since 2024 I have been primarily based at Oxford University in the UK, where I am Professor of Linguistics. I maintain a part-time role at UMD, and I spend around a third of each academic year in College Park, which remains my family's home base. I continue to (co-)supervise graduate students and do some teaching in Linguistics and Language Science at UMD.

I mostly do just two closely related things.

First, I do research on psycholinguistics. I am impressed by the rich structure of human language, especially the countless details that we’re not consciously aware of. I want to know how children ever manage to learn this. And I want to know how the structures are encoded and manipulated, in cognitive and neuroscientific terms. The search for answers to these questions has led me to work with many different tools, languages, and fields of research. Recently we have gotten a lot of mileage from studying linguistic illusions, and from studying the relation between comprehension and production.

Second, I am an evangelist for Language Science. Language is hugely important to humans, but it rarely features among priority areas for universities or for science in general. Over the course of 20 years I worked with colleagues at UMD to change that, leading initiatives in interdisciplinary graduate education and establishing the Maryland Language Science Center, an umbrella organization that connected language experts across 17 academic units at UMD.

 
 
CV: CV
Personal Website
Colin Phillips' personal website

Degrees

  • BA
    Oxford University (1990)
  • PhD
    MIT (1996)
Research Methods
Electrophysiology
Neuroimaging
Behavior
Linguistics
Research Interests
Language
  • Campus
    Service
    Director, Maryland Language Science Center (2013-2023)
  • International
    Service
    Editor, Annual Reviews in Linguistics (2021-2025)
  • National
    Service
    Advisory Board, Planet Word Museum (Washington DC)
  • National
    Service
    Chair (2022-2023), Section Z, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Current Students

Former Students

  • Student Name
    Nina Kazanina (2005, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Professor of Neuroscience, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
  • Student Name
    Masaya Yoshida (2006, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Professor of Linguistics, ICREA, Barcelona (Spain)
  • Student Name
    Leticia Pablos (2006, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Associate Professor, Institute of Linguistics Leiden University (Holland)
  • Student Name
    Takuya Goro (2007, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Associate Professor, Tsuda College (Japan)
  • Student Name
    Matthew Wagers (2008, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Professor of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz
  • Student Name
    Clare Stroud (2008, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Senior Program Officer, National Academies (Institute of Medicine)
  • Student Name
    Ellen Lau (2009, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Maryland
  • Student Name
    Akira Omaki (2010, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    (deceased) Previously, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington
  • Student Name
    Brian Dillon (2011, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Professor of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Student Name
    Wing Yee Chow (2013, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Associate Professor of Linguistics, University College London (UK)
  • Student Name
    Shevaun Lewis (2013, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Research Associate Professor, University of Maryland Language Science Center
  • Student Name
    Dave Kush (2013, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Toronto
  • Student Name
    Dan Parker (2014, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Associate Professor of Linguistics, The Ohio State University
  • Student Name
    Sol Lago
    Current Position
    Associate Professor, University of Frankfurt (Germany)
  • Student Name
    Dustin Chacón (2015, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Student Name
    Shota Momma (2016, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Student Name
    Allyson Ettinger (2018, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, University of Chicago
  • Student Name
    Anton Malko (2018, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Postdoctoral Researcher, Australian National University
  • Student Name
    Lara Ehrenhofer (2018, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Data Scientist, German AutoLabs (Berlin, Germany)
  • Student Name
    Nick Huang (2019, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Assistant Professor of Linguistics, National University of Singapore
  • Student Name
    Phoebe Gaston (2020, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Assistant Professor, McMaster University (Canada)
  • Student Name
    Hanna Muller (2022, Linguistics)
  • Student Name
    Masato Nakamura (2023, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Postdoc, University of Saarland, Germany
  • Student Name
    Eun-kyoung (Rosa) Lee (2025, Linguistics)
    Current Position
    Data Scientists, Amazon
Colin Phillips
1413A Marie Mount Hall
Neuroscience and Cognitive Science
Email
colin [at] umd.edu
Office Hours
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