Shari Speer is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a Professor of Linguistics.  Her primary research area is Psycholinguistics. She received a PhD in Human Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. She is particularly interested in the relationship between language production and comprehension, with a particular focus on contributions from intonation and prosodic structure. Her research employs insights from linguistic theory and empirical contributions from eye movement monitoring, phonetic and phonological analyses of spontaneous and lab speech, and traditional reaction-time paradigms to develop models of language processing, with a focus on the time-course of underlying cognitive mechanisms.