Maria Fernanda Ferreira (born 22 September 1960) is a cognitive psychologist known for empirical investigations in psycholinguistics and language processing.
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).
Ferreira worked under the supervision of Charles (Chuck) Clifton, Jr investigating relationships between syntactic processing and phonology.
That is, the language processing system develops partial or superficial representations, which are "good enough" for the task they are meant to perform.
[7][9] One of Ferreira's methodological contributions is the auditory moving-window[2] technique, which was used to assess influences of prosody,[10] lexical frequency, and syntactic complexity[11] in spoken-language comprehension.