Melissa Baese-Berk
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics and the College
Melissa Baese-Berk is a linguist who studies the way people understand, produce, and learn spoken language, with an emphasis on second-language acquisition. Her work draws on concepts from psychology, cognitive science, and communication sciences. Her current projects examine communication between healthcare providers and aging patients, as well as the relationship between perception (listening) and production (speaking) among learners of a second language.
Her research has been published in Cognition, Journal of Memory and Language, eLife, and Psychological Science.
Baese-Berk earned a BA from Boston University, with concentrations in linguistics and music (violin performance), and a PhD in linguistics from Northwestern University, with a certificate in cognitive science. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Michigan State University College of Communication Arts and Sciences and a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language in San Sebastián, Spain. Most recently, she was a member of the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon.