Kathleen Eberhard
Associate Professor of Psychology
Office: 119A Haggar Hall
Phone: 574-631-7627
Email: Eberhard.1@nd.edu
Areas of Expertise
Spoken language production and comprehension, smart robots
The art of conversation also is a science to Eberhard, a psycholinguist who studies the mental processes underlying the production and comprehension of fluent speech. Her research investigates the processes by which two people communicate in face-to-face dialogue and also informs a related line of query that aims to equip robots with more natural language capabilities. Eberhard is part of a team of researchers from Notre Dame and Indiana, Arizona State and Stanford Universities that is working to improve robotic technology, “trying to create more autonomous, decision-making robots that can think, plan and prioritize, without being completely controlled by humans,” she explains. She also has studied the interaction between bilinguals’ knowledge of their first and second languages.
