Maayan
Keshev

Dr. Maayan Keshev is a new faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research examines the cognitive process of understanding language.

Through psycholinguistic experiments, Maayan examines how readers and listeners extract meaning from a sentence quickly and efficiently (even before it is complete).

As an Azrieli Fellow, Maayan will investigate comprehenders’ predictions regarding the unfolding of sentences. Specifically, her project will examine whether, in this prediction process, comprehenders use abstract grammatical categories that unite a broad array of words or word strings. The project will contribute to core debates in linguistics about the balance between abstract generative knowledge and the knowledge of regularities associated with specific words.

Maayan completed her PhD at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Aya Meltzer-Asscher. During her doctoral studies, she examined how comprehenders use grammatical knowledge and past experience to overcome ambiguity and errors in sentences they read. Her work was among the first to explore sentence processing in Hebrew. In her postdoctoral work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Maayan investigated questions about the source of comprehension errors with her advisor, Prof. Brian Dillon. She advanced an account of interference between multiple linguistic elements that have to be concurrently maintained in memory. Maayan lives with her spouse, Ofir, and their dog, Fudge. She enjoys sewing clothes, eating chocolate, and sunshine.