Roger Kreuz has been a professor of psychology for thirty years. After studying psychology and linguistics at the University of Toledo, he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in experimental psychology at Princeton University and was a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive gerontology at Duke University. He has conducted research and published on diverse topics in the psychology of language, but primarily in the areas of text and discourse processing and figurative language. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. He has coedited two books: Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics and Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication. He currently serves as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.
Richard Roberts’s educational background spans the speech and hearing sciences, clinical psychology, and experimental psychology. After earning his doctorate at the University of Memphis, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Health Statistics. He spent twelve years teaching psychology in Europe and Asia with the University of Maryland University College. Since 2006 he has been a US diplomat, serving at embassies in Niger, Japan, South Korea, and Mongolia. He has also studied French, Japanese, and Korean at the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. He is currently the public affairs officer for the US Consulate General in Naha, Okinawa, Japan.
Together, Roger and Richard have published research articles and book chapters on discourse processing and pragmatics. They are also the authors of Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language (MIT Press, 2015) and Getting Through: The Perils and Pleasures of Cross-Cultural Communication (MIT Press, 2017).