Fernanda Ferreira (psychologist)

Ferreira is an editor of Collabra: Psychology, an open access psychology journal published by the University of California Press. She is also an associate editor of the journal Cognitive Psychology. She previously served as an associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology (1997–2000) and the Journal of Memory and Language (2001–2004).

Ferreira served as Programme Director for Linguistics for the National Science Foundation from 1996-1997. From 2004 until 2006, Ferreira was the Director of the Center for the Integrated Study of Vision and Language at Michigan State University. She was Chair of Language and Cognition and Professor in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh from 2006 until 2010.

In 1995, Ferreira was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology for cognition and human learning by the American Psychological Association. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).

Ferreira received her BA (Honours) in Psychology from the University of Manitoba in 1982. She went on to complete postgraduate work at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, obtaining degrees in Linguistics (MA 1986) and Psychology (MS 1985, PhD 1988). At U Mass Amherst. Ferreira worked under the supervision of Charles (Chuck) Clifton, Jr investigating relationships between syntactic processing and phonology. Her dissertation, "Planning and Timing in Sentence Production: The Syntax-to-Phonology Conversion," provided evidence that phonological structures and representations, rather than syntactic structures, impact the timing of sentence-level speech.

Maria Fernanda Ferreira (born 22 September 1960) is a cognitive psychologist known for empirical investigations in psycholinguistics and language processing. Ferreira is Professor of Psychology and the Principal investigator of the Ferreira Lab at University of California, Davis.