Kristen Tooley is Associate Professor of Psychology at Texas State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Davis in 2009, conducting research on syntactic priming in sentence comprehension under the mentorship of Professors Matt Traxler and Tamara Swaab.

In the Swaab Lab, Dr. Tooley used ERP measures to investigate how prior linguistic experience influences online syntactic parsing. Her research provided key evidence that syntactic priming effects can occur during comprehension, not just production. Importantly, she also showed that such priming depends on the repetition of specific verbs rather than synonymous alternatives, highlighting a tight coupling between lexical representations and syntactic structure. These findings support models in which syntactic information is closely tied to specific lexical items.

Dr. Tooley has continued this line of work in her own lab, expanding investigations of language processing and learning across development and adult populations.