Main profile

Colin

Phillips

Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher

Founding Director, Maryland Language Science Center (2013-2023)

Interests: 

Cognitive Neuroscience, Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics

Projects: 

Graduate-IGERT, Graduate-NRT, Graduate-ProPELL, International-GRAIL, Langscape, Outreach, Winter Storm

Units: 

Language Science Center, Linguistics, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science

Degree(s): 

BA, 1990, Oxford, Modern Languages

Ph.D., 1996, MIT, Linguistics

Contact: 

colin@umd.edu

301-405-3082 (email is better)

1413F Marie Mount Hall

Role(s): 

Faculty, Management

Website: 

Colin's website

Colin's publications

Google Scholar Profile

Blog: 

Colin's blog

About: 

I am from the flat fen country of eastern England. I first came to the US in 1990 for what was supposed to be a 10-month stay. It lasted a little longer than that. I came to the University of Maryland in 2000, and was instrumental in developing UMD's language science community. I was founding director of the Maryland Language Science Center from 2013-2023.

From 2024 I divide my time between the University of Oxford (UK), where I am Professor of Linguistics, and a part-time role at the University of Maryland, where I spend part of each year. My research group spans the US and the UK.

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 got a lot of mileage from studying linguistic illusions.

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. At the University of Maryland we worked as a multi-disciplinary team to change this. We believe that the basic science of language, and applications in education, technology and health all benefit from closer interaction — it’s easier to fix a system when we understand how it is supposed to work. The Maryland Language Science Center, and the many initiatives that it has created, are a testament to our belief that it’s genuinely useful when you put together the pieces of language science, for science and for society alike.

Collaborators: 

Valentine Hacquard
Bill Idsardi
Ellen Lau
Jeff Lidz
Rochelle Newman
Maria Polinsky
Tess Wood

Current and Former Students: 

Dave Schneider, PhD 1999; Cycorp Inc.
Meesook Kim, PhD 1999, Sangji University, Korea
Sachiko Aoshima, PhD 2003, US Government
Nina Kazanina, PhD 2005, U of Geneva (Switzerland)
Masaya Yoshida, PhD 2006, Northwestern U
Leticia Pablos, PhD 2006, Leiden U (Holland)
Takuya Goro, PhD 2007, Tsuda College (Japan)
Ming Xiang, postdoc 2005-2007, U of Chicago
Matt Wagers, PhD 2008, UC Santa Cruz
Clare Stroud, PhD 2008, National Academies of Science
Ellen Lau, PhD 2009, U of Maryland
Akira Omaki, PhD 2010, Univerity of Washington (died 2018)
Brian Dillon, PhD 2011, U of Massachusetts
Wing Yee Chow, PhD 2013, Univ College London
Dave Kush, PhD 2013, University of Toronto
Shevaun Lewis, PhD 2013, U of Maryland
Dan Parker, PhD 2014, Ohio State University
María Sol Lago, PhD 2014, U of Franfurt (Germany)
Dustin Chacón, PhD 2015, University of Georgia
Shota Momma, PhD 2016, U of Massachusetts
Lara Ehrenhofer, PhD 2018, Data Science team leader, Berlin, Germany
Anton Malko, PhD 2018, Australian National University
Allyson Ettinger, PhD 2018, U of Chicago
Nick Huang, PhD 2019, National University of Singapore
Phoebe Gaston, PhD 2020, McMaster University (Canada)
Hanna Muller, PhD 2022
Masato Nakamura, PhD 2023, University of Saarland (Germany)
Eun-Kyoung Rosa Lee, PhD expected 2025
Katherine Howitt, PhD expected 2026
London Dixon, PhD expected 2026
Allison Dods, PhD expected 2027
Sathvik Nair, PhD expected 2027
Sebastian Mancha, PhD expected 2027
Utku Turk, PhD expected 2027