Rate My Professor Jeffrey Witzel

Jeffrey D. Witzel is Associate Professor, Department Chair, and Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL at the University of Texas at Arlington. He earned his PhD from the University of Arizona and joined UTA in 2010 as Assistant Professor, advancing to Associate Professor and assuming the role of Department Chair in Spring 2026. As Director of the Psycholinguistics Lab in University Hall, his research centers on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, with primary interests in lexical processing, sentence comprehension, reading, and second language acquisition. Witzel investigates parsing mechanisms, structural ambiguities, L1/L2 processing differences, and effects like intervenor priming using experimental methods such as eye-tracking, maze tasks, moving-window paradigms, and event-related potentials.

Witzel has published extensively in top journals, including 'Comparisons of online reading paradigms: Eye tracking, moving-window, and maze' (Behavior Research Methods, 2012; 184 citations), 'Deeper than shallow: Evidence for structure-based parsing biases in second-language sentence processing' (Applied Psycholinguistics, 2012; 131 citations), 'Sources of relative clause processing difficulty: Evidence from Russian' (Journal of Memory and Language, 2017; 21 citations), 'Perceptual salience and structural ambiguity resolution' (Applied Psycholinguistics, 2023, with Naoko Witzel), 'Plausibility and structural reanalysis in L1 and L2 sentence comprehension' (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2023, with Juyoung Lee), and 'Relative clause processing in L1 and L2 English: A maze task investigation' (Journal of Second Language Studies, 2021, with Naoko Witzel). He has presented over 50 papers and posters at major conferences, including the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Second Language Research Forum, Linguistic Society of America annual meetings, and International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, with invited talks at University of Maryland, Nagoya University, and University of Oklahoma. For teaching excellence, he received the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award in 2015 and participated in panels on research integrity and mentoring at UTA. His work influences studies in bilingual sentence processing and experimental psycholinguistics.