Dr Suhail Matar

What fascinates Suhail are the cognitive and neural mechanisms required to serialise a highly-structured mental object to produce language, and those required to re-weave this serialised language signal back into a highly-structured mental representation.

Examples of research questions that Suhail has worked on include how the human brain processes syntactic structure and information in reading comprehension, whether and how morphemes are segmented in speech comprehension, and whether and how discourse referents are strung into hierarchical structures. To address these questions, Suhail uses a combination of electrophysiology (MEG/EEG), neuroimaging (fMRI), and behavioural experiments, in addition to computational cognitive modelling that allows him to home in on the cognitive operators that give rise to language comprehension. Additionally, Suhail takes a cross-linguistic approach to experimental neuro- and psycholinguistics, taking advantage of unique (e.g., grammatical) properties in understudied languages, such as Arabic, to shed light on language comprehension.

Prior to joining the University of Cambridge, Suhail obtained his PhD from New York University’s Psychology Department (Cognition and Perception program) in 2022, before becoming a post-doctoral fellow at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). He also holds an MSc and a BSc in Biomedical Engineering.

For more information about Suhail’s research, please visit his website’s Research page.