David Kemmerer

Biography

David Kemmerer obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from SUNY Buffalo in 1996, was a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Iowa from 1997 to 2000, and since then has maintained a 50/50 joint appointment in SLHS and Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. His teaching responsibilities include courses on the neural bases of speech and language, the field of cognitive neuroscience, and topics in linguistics. His research focuses primarily on how different kinds of linguistic meaning are mediated by different neural systems, drawing on behavioral and lesion data from brain-damaged patients as well as behavioral and functional neuroimaging data from normal subjects. His current projects include the linguistic encoding of action and the syntax-semantics interface. In addition, he is interested in the evolution of language and the neural correlates of consciousness. He has published papers in Cognitive Neuropsychology, Neuropsychologia, Neurocase, Neuroreport, Neuroinformatics, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Cortex, Cognition, Psychological Science, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Neurolinguistics, Aphasiology, Brain and Language, Language and Cognitive Processes, Language and Linguistics Compass, Language and Speech, Lingua, and Language. He has also contributed chapters to several volumes, including Action to language via the mirror neuron system(edited by M. Arbib), Words in the mind: How words capture human experience (edited by B. Malt and P. Wolff), Language, cognition, and space: The state of the art and new directions (edited by V. Evans and P. Chilton), and the Routledge handbook of linguistics (edited by K. Allan). In addition, he recently finished writing a textbook called The cognitive neuroscience of language (to appear in 2014). Finally, he has been a General Editor for Language and Cognition since it was launched in 2009, and he has served as a reviewer for over 30 journals.

Research Interest

Neural substrates of semantic knowledge in relation to perception and action