Teenie Matlock | |
---|---|
Occupation | Professor Emerita |
Awards | Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building (2023) Athena Award for Academic Leadership – CITRIS Women in Tech Initiative (2021) Senate Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentorship (2016)Contents |
Academic background | |
Alma mater |
|
Academic work | |
Discipline | Cognitive Science |
Institutions | UC Merced |
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. [1] Her research has deepened understanding of the impact of language and communication in cognition,politics as well as climate science. [2] As a leading researcher on the meaning of words in discussions of climate change,Matlock has been asked to weigh in on the value of shared language between energy companies and groups advocating for immediate changes to protect the environment. [3] She recently retired and now holds the position of Professor Emerita of Cognitive Science at University of California,Merced. [4]
Teenie Matlock received the 2015-2016 Senate Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentorship at UC Merced [5] for successful mentoring of faculty and creating a positive environment for faculty to be successful. Her contribution as a caring and thoughtful leader and community builder were again recognized in 2021,when she received the Athena Award for Academic Leadership from CITRIS Women in Tech Initiative [6] and again in 2023 when she received the Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building from the Cognitive Science Society. [2]
Teenie Matlock grew up in Mariposa,CA. She is the eldest of five children,growing up in impoverished conditions. [6] Her family ancestry includes Native American heritage,from the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, [2] from both her mother's and father's sides,as well as lineage tracing back to Gold Rush miners. [7] In 1976,she graduated from Mariposa High School. None of her family at that point had attended college. [8]
Matlock began her post-secondary education as a first generation student at Fresno City College [7] where her initial focus was on being a trumpet player. [6] She received her B.A. in Liberal Studies at California State University,Fresno (CSU Fresno) in 1983 and an M.A. in Linguistics from CSU Fresno in 1985. She attended graduate school at University of California,Santa Cruz where she obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology in 2001. [9] She worked under the supervision of Raymond Gibbs,Jr. at University of California,Santa Cruz where her dissertation research focused on answering how fictive motion,figurative language that uses motion verbs with nouns that do not typically move (i.e.,"A road crosses the street"),is understood. [10]
Matlock did her postdoctoral work at Stanford University where she continued her work on fictive motion. [11] 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. [12] 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 [13] that allowed her to host a 2009 conference at UC Merced on the "Future of Cognitive Science." [12]
She has served as Associate Editor for the journal Cognitive Linguistics and has also participated on the editorial boards of Cognitive Science and Environmental Communication. [14] 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. [15]
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. [7] She helped get the UC System to make tuition free to California Native students of federally recognized tribes. [2] In January 2023,Matlock joined UC Santa Cruz as Special Adviser to the Chancellor on Indigenous Relations for the purpose of providing leadership and advice on Native initiatives. [16] In June of 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. [17]
Matlock has also continued to play trumpet. She performed with the G Street Revolution,a UC Merced faculty band,in 2017 [18] and has played Taps at the closing portion of the Memorial Day Service in Mariposa in 2024. [19]
Matlock's research has made significant contributions to both basic and applied science. Her 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. [20] Matlock's subsequent research demonstrated that engaging with fictive motion sentences influences people's understanding of time. [11] In this study,after reading and illustrating a fictive motion sentence like The bike path runs alongside the creek,study participants were more likely to answer an ambiguous question Next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now that it has been rescheduled? with the answer Friday rather than Monday, in contrast to those who read the non-figurative sentence The bike path is next to the creek. Findings suggested that participants' thinking about time was influenced by imagining the forward motion in the fictive motion sentence. This finding was replicated in two subsequent studies in this paper. This work has deepened our basic understanding of how people process figurative language.
Her research on how people understand grammar and metaphor has also led to practical applications,demonstrating how these language elements influence people's attitudes about climate change and political candidates. [21] 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 we think about how the use of language may influence voters' perceptions of a political candidate and potentially influence their voting preferences. [22] 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. [23]
Merced is a city in, and the county seat of, Merced County, California, United States, in the San Joaquin Valley. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 86,333, up from 78,958 in 2010. Incorporated on April 1, 1889, Merced is a charter city that operates under a council–manager government. It is named after the Merced River, which flows nearby.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. Some well known idioms in English are spill the beans, it's raining cats and dogs, and break a leg.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."
The University of California, Merced is a public land-grant research university in Merced, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California (UC) system. Established in 2005, UC Merced is the newest campus within the UC system. The primary campus is located around five miles north of Merced and sits adjacent to Lake Yosemite. The main campus is around 1,026 acres in size. Large swaths of protected natural grasslands surround the university.
Eve Eliot Sweetser is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1984, and has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since that time. She has served as Director of Berkeley's undergraduate Cognitive Science Program and is currently Director of the Celtic Studies Program.
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. She previously served on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford University.
Cognitive rhetoric refers to an approach to rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy as well as a method for language and literary studies drawing from, or contributing to, cognitive science.
Fictive motion is the metaphorical motion of an object or abstraction through space. Fictive motion has become a subject of study in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. In fictive motion sentences, a motion verb applies to a subject that is not literally capable of movement in the physical world, as in the sentence, "The fence runs along the perimeter of the house." Fictive motion is so called because it is attributed to material states, objects, or abstract concepts, that cannot (sensibly) be said to move themselves through physical space. Fictive motion sentences are pervasive in English and other languages.
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. is a former psychology professor and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests are in the fields of experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive science. His work concerns a range of theoretical issues, ranging from questions about the role of embodied experience in thought and language, to looking at people's use and understanding of figurative language. Raymond Gibbs's research is especially focused on bodily experience and linguistic meaning. Much of his research is motivated by theories of meaning in philosophy, linguistics, and comparative literature.
Jeannette Littlemore is a British scholar of English and applied linguistics whose work focuses on the interpretation of figurative language, including metaphor and metonymy, as it relates to second language learning and teaching. Her research examines the ways that metaphor is misunderstood by learners of English.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a soil biogeochemist and political ecologist who served as Director of the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy from 2022 to 2024. She is a Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences; University of California, Merced. Her research group works to understand how soil helps regulate the Earth's climate.
Shavone Charles, known mononymously as SHAVONE. is an American entrepreneur and musician. Shavone is the director of communications at VSCO. Forbes honored Shavone on the coveted 30 Under 30 Marketing & Advertising list.
Teamrat Afewerki Ghezzehei is an American earth scientist and the Associate Professor of Environmental Soil Physics at the University of California, Merced. He specialises in soil physics, agroecology and environmental stewardship.
Jessica Lynn Blois is an American paleoecologist.
Ashlie Martini is a tribologist and professor of mechanical engineering at University of California, Merced.
Metaphorical framing is a particular type of framing that attempts to influence decision-making by mapping characteristics of one concept in terms of another. The purpose of metaphorical framing is to convey an abstract or complex idea in easier-to-comprehend terms by mapping characteristics of an abstract or complex source onto characteristics of a simpler or concrete target. Metaphorical framing is based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work on conceptual metaphors, which holds that human cognition is metaphorically conceptualized. Metaphorical framing has been used in political rhetoric to influence political decision-making.
Seana Coulson is a cognitive scientist known for her research on the neurobiology of language and studies of how meaning is constructed in human language, including experimental pragmatics, concepts, semantics, and metaphors. She is a professor in the Cognitive Science department at University of California, San Diego, where her Brain and Cognition Laboratory focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of language and reasoning.
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano is a professor of linguistics at the University of Zaragoza known for her research in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link){{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link){{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)