Zenzi M. Griffin studies the processes that allow people to express anything using spoken language. She has been particularly concerned with how people select and order words and phrases, and the way that they manage (and mismanage) the timing of word retrieval and the articulation of speech. Current projects address the retrieval of personal names and a huge project on language impairment in Spanish-English bilinguals in collaboration with Drs. Elizabeth Peña and Lisa Bedore.

Dr. Griffin is a graduate of the International Baccalaureate program at Kungsholmens Gymnasium in Stockholm, Sweden. She studied psychology at Stockholm University for one year before transferring to Michigan State University, where she earned a BA in Psychology and worked with Dr. Rose Zacks. In 1998, she received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (with a minor in Linguistics) from the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There she worked with Dr. Kathryn Bock and Dr. Gary Dell. She spent three years as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Dr. Griffin became an assistant professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech in the summer of 2001 and was promoted to associate professor in 2005. She spent the 2006-2007 academic year as a visiting scientist at Hunter College in New York in the Language Acquisition Research Center. In 2008, she joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin as a full professor.

Dr. Griffin is not a clinician and cannot provide any clinical or therapeutic suggestions. However, she can tell you a lot about psycholinguistic research, personal names, and bicycling.

CV