Zachary Maher

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at Montclair State University. I’m interested in how people navigate a world that is filled with language variation. Most of my work focuses on morphosyntactic (grammatical) variation, including differences between African American Language (AAL) and Dominant (“Standard”) American English.

In one line of research, I frame variation as a cognitive phenomenon, asking how people represent and process morphosyntactic differences across language varieties (dialects). I have used a variety of methods to address this question, including EEG, eye-tracking and various behavioral measures. In another line of research, I have also studied the effects of a sociolinguistically-informed intervention, examining its impact on AAL-speaking children’s reading growth and their teachers’ language ideologies.

Before coming to Montclair, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in Language Sciences at Virginia Tech, advised by Abby Walker. I was also an NSF-SPRF Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State, where I was a member of the Bilingualism and Linguistic Diversity Lab and advised by Janet van Hell. I received my Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science from the University of Maryland, where I was advised by Jan Edwards and Jared Novick, and I completed my B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics at Yale, where I was a founding member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.