Dr. Schafer specializes in psycholinguistics and spoken language processing, with particular attention to prosody/intonation and information structure (e.g., given, new, and focused information). Her interests include adult, child, native, non-native, and bilingual sentence and discourse processing in a range of languages (especially English, Korean, Japanese, and Austronesian languages). She is also exploring psycholinguistic topics in language documentation (field psycholinguistics), including detecting early signs of language endangerment (see the聽) and attrition in heritage speakers. Much of her research is conducted in the College of LLL鈥檚 Language Analysis and Experimentation Laboratories (), which she co-founded in 2001 and co-directs, and which contain facilities for recording, subject running, freehead eyetracking, and other common experimental tasks. Professor Schafer regularly teaches聽, an undergraduate introduction to psycholinguistics;聽, a graduate introduction to psycholinguistics; LING 632, a graduate introduction to experimental methods for language research; and seminars in psycholinguistics, including methods in聽. One of her聽聽projects examines prosody, event structure, and referential processing in native English speakers versus Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English.