John Drury

John Drury’s research focuses on connecting psycholinguistics with cognitive neuroscience. He is a recent PhD from the Linguistics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and trained in cognitive neuropsychology as a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University's Department of Neuroscience before coming to McGill. His 2005 dissertation (supervised by Juan Uriagereka) dealt with foundational issues in syntactic theory and developed a novel framework drawing together aspects of minimalist syntax and Tree Adjoining Grammar formalisms.

The primary focus of his ongoing research is on studies using event related brain potentials to probe the nature of sentence level logical semantic processing, concentrating on two sets of phenomena that have been subject to intense scrutiny in linguistics: the Definiteness Effect in existential constructions and Negative Polarity Item licensing.