Ph.D., Stanford University
M.Sc., University of Edinburgh
A.B., Harvard University

Jean Fox Tree is a cognitive psychologist specializing in psycholinguistics. She studies the production and comprehension of spontaneous speech, and more recently, spontaneous writing such as instant messaging.

Projects in Fox Tree's lab include studies of discourse markers (words like well, oh, I mean, and you know), enquoting devices (said, like, just like, all like), Spanish speech devices, and instant messaging.

Fox Tree uses a variety of techniques to explore her areas of interest, including corpora analyses, reaction time experiments, questionnaires, referential communication tasks, and analyses of speech produced under controlled conditions.

Psycholinguistics: production and comprehension of spontaneous speech, disfluencies and discourse markers in speech, listeners' interpretations of speech.

Clark, H.H. and Fox Tree, J.E. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking, Cognition, 2002, 84, 73-111.

Bryant, G. and Fox Tree, J.E. Recognizing verbal irony in spontaneous speech, Metaphor and Symbol, 2002, 17(2), 99-117.

Fox Tree, J.E., and Schrock, J.C. Basic meanings of you know and I mean. Journal of Pragmatics, 2002, 34, 727-747.

Listeners’ uses of “um” and “uh” in speech comprehension. Memory and Cognition. 2001. 29(2), 320-326.

Coordinating spontaneous talk. In Wheeldon, L.R. (Ed.), Aspects of Language Production, Phildaelphia: Psychology Press, 2000, 375-406.

Listening in on monologues and dialogues. Discourse Processes, 1999, 27, 35–53.

Fox Tree, J.E., and Schrock, J.C. Discourse markers in spontaneous speech: Oh what a difference an “oh” makes. Journal of Memory and Language, 1999, 40, 280–295.

Fox Tree, J.E., and Clark, H.H. Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking, Cognition, 1997, 62, 151–67.