Thomas G Bever

Interests

Teaching

Consciousness Studiies; Psycholinguistics; Cerebral asymmetries; History of writing systems; history of (psycho)linguistics

Research

Consciousness; Sentence processing; language acquisition; language universals; aesthetics; psychology of music; genetic differences in neurological organization for cognition and language.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Chapters

• Bever, T. G. (2017). The unity of consciousness and the consciousness of unity. In in: de Almeida, R. G. & Gleitman, L. (Eds.) (forthcoming). Minds on Language and Thought. Oxford University Press..
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  This is a solicited paper for a volume honoring the ideas of Jerry fodor (NOT a festschrift). In the paper I explore the significance of findings involving normal conversation for the Poverty of the Stimulus, and for theories of consciousness. I immodestly think it is one of my best papers....
• Bever, T. G. (2016). The Bio-psychology of language universals - the next years.. In Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis of Linguistic Structures(pp 385-405). Oxford University Press.
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  This is an invited final chapter in the paperback edition of a book based on a special conference assessing the field since publication of my 1970 paper, "The cognitive basis for linguistic structures". Other contributors include Piatelli-Palmarini, Mehler, Yang, Grodjhinsky, Dell, Tanenhaus, Ferreira, Phillips, Poeppel, McElree, Janet Fodor, Stabler, among others. The book is edited by Laka and Sanz, "The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structure: New Approaches and Enduring Themes" Your Role: sole author;
• Bever, T. G. (2014). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structures(pp 1-80). Oxford University Press.
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  This is a reprint of my 1970 paper of the same title. The book is a set of chapters contributed by active researchers and scholars on the scientific impact of that paper. The resulting book was prepublished in 2013, with the final published version appearing in 2014.
• Bever, T. G., & none, . (2015). The Bio-psychology of language universals - the next years.. In Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis of Linguistic Structures(pp 385-405). Oxford University Press.
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  This is an invited final chapter for a book based on a special conference assessing the field since publication of my 1970 paper, "The cognitive basis for linguistic structures". Other contributors include Piatelli-Palmarini, Mehler, Yang, Grodjhinsky, Dell, Tanenhaus, Ferreira, Phillips, Poeppel, McElree, Janet Fodor, Stabler, among others. The book is edited by Laka and Sanz, "The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structure:New Approaches and Enduring Themes" It appeared online in 2013 and in print in 2014,Your Role: sole author;
• Bever, T. G., OBryan, E., Folli, R., & Harley, H. (2014). Evidence for the use of verb telicity in sentence comprehension. In Syntax and its limits(pp 80-104). Oxford University Press.
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  The volume is a collection of chapters on verb structure: Your Role: This is a tough call. The research used reduced relatives, which are often attributed to me; it involved several behavioral techniques, at least one contributed totally from my work. So, on the empirical side, I would assess my role as 50%. However, Heidi and Raffi contributed to serious theoretical aspects, which I could admire, but not contribute to very much....so....;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: This is a joint collaboration with Heidi Harley here, Raffaella Folli who was a postdoc with me, Erin OBryan. It started as Erin's thesis with the three faculty on her committee. Further research here elaborated the dissertation, and resulted in this review article.;

Journals/Publications

• Bever, T. G. (2021). How Cognition Came into Being. Cognition. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104761
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  This is, for me, a major publication. It was solicited and then reviewed by the journal Cognition, to recount the history of how the journal was founded by me and Jacques Mehler; and to comment on the past and future of the cognitive sciences. Published last august (2021), according to various citation sources, it has already been read and downloaded more than 500 times.
• Obryan, E., Folli, R., Harley, H., & Bever, T. (2014). Event Structure Affects On-line Sentence Comprehension". Syntax Semantics Interface.
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  This was an eye movement study of reading sentences with telic verbs, using the reduced relative paradigm to measure early stages of processing. It has been returned with suggested revisions. (mostly a request to use fixed effects statistical models). We are still re analyzing the data.
• Bever, T. G., & Nicholas, C. (2016). The Golden Mean and Depth Perception. Language and Cognition, 2(1), 10-26. doi:10.17923/LCS201602001
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  This paper presents the basic finding that the golden mean frame enhances the perception of depth between two simple stimuli which are known to involve depth effects. It follows from a prediction made in an earlier paper by me that explains the preference for GM rectangles as a function of perceptual processes which themselves involve applying a 3D analysis to the 2D presentation.
• Piattelli-Palmarini, M., Bever, T. G., & Medeiros, D. (2016). Commentary on Christiansen and Chater: Many important language universals are not reducible to processing or cognition. Invited commentary on Christianen, Morten H., and Nick Chater, “The Now-or-Never Bottleneck: A Fundamental Constraint on Language.”.. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Special Issue Vol. 39, 39, 42-43.
• Bever, T. G., Hancock, R., & sun, X. (2015). Is Subject Relatives Preference Universal? - ERP evidence from Chinese relative clause processing.. Chinese Journal of Applied Lingusitics, 39(1), 92-114.
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  ;Your Role: I collaborated with Sun, a visiting graduate student on the research. Hancock assisted in running the EEG component.;This paper is based on the research that Sun carried out in my lab during her postdoctoral visit. Chinese relative clauses have become controversial with respect to whether they confirm a universal claim that subject relatives are easier than object relatives. Chinese is an interesting test case, because relative clauses are preposed and left branching, while all other constructions in Chinese are right branching. So object relatives are in their canonical post verbal position within the relative clause, while subject relatives are displaced from their agent/subject position. This allows one to look at whether the generally reported difficulty of object relatives is due to the displacement of the object from its canonical post-verbal position within the relative clause, as in English.Studies of this in Chinese are inconsistent. For example, Lin and I provided evidence in several reading time studies that subject relatives are easier than object relatives, contra Gibson’s laboratory results. Somewhere the resolution lies in methodological or materials differences.
• Bartoli, E., D'Ausilio, A., Berry, J., Badino, L., Bever, T., & Fadiga, L. (2014). Listener--speaker perceived distance predicts the degree of motor contribution to speech perception. Cerebral Cortex, 281-288.
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  IT IS CONFUSING WHEN THIS ARTICLE APPEARED: THE PREPUBLICATION WAS IN 2013 AND THE PRINT VERSION IN 2014, ALTHOUGH THE WEBSITE EVEN SHOWS A 2015 VERSION ONLINE,This is a paper using TMS to show involvement of the motors system in discriminating CV syllables, labials (ba. pa) and dentals (ta. da). Fadiga et al had shown that stimulating the corresponding motor area facilitated discrimination of labials or dentals. But this only worked in noise. I suggested using multiple speakers to create the stimuli so subjects would not be able to fixate on a particular acoustic feature of each stimulus. It worked: the original effect now appears without noise. In addition we scaled the size of the effect against the perceived similarity of the particular stimulus voice and the subjects own voice, further supporting the notion of access to an internal production during the discrimination. Luciano and I were billed as equal senior authors.

Presentations

• Bever, T. G., & Sun, X. (2016, December). Chinese subject-relative clauses are more difficult to process than the object-relative clauses: Evidence from topicalized sentences. The International Conference on the Processing of East Asian Languages. Guangzhou, China: South China Normal University.
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  A behavioral study of processing chinese relative clauses: the most unique result is the isolation of a garden path in which Chinese object relatives are taken to be the main clause....kind of like reduced relatives in English....
• Bever, T. G., Sun, X., & Hancock, R. (2016, October). Is Subject-relative Preference Universal? - Evidence from Event-related Potentials. The 16th Symposium of Chinese Contemporary Linguistics.. Shanghai, China.
• Bever, T. G. (2015, Fall, 2016). THREE LECTURES ON CURRENT ISSUES IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE. University of Maryland - special invitation.
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  This was a set of three invited lectures to the linguistics and cognitive science programs at UMaryland.1. Language Acquisition via general problem solving.2. The effects of familial handedness on cognition and neurological organization3. Aesthetics of the Golden Mean Ratio, and depth perception
• Bever, T. G. (2014, 2014-07-01). Neurological variation in Language representation. Special lecture:. Higher School of Economics - MoscowRussia.
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  This was a special colloquium given where I was consulting on ongoing collaborative research.Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Bever, T. G. (2014, December). Aesthetics and Experimental Investigations. INAUGURAL CONFERENCE: MAX PLANCK ON EXPERIMENTAL AESTHETICS, FRANKFURT S.
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  This was an inaugural conference on "empirical aesthetics" at the new MPI for "experimental aesthetics". Invited plenary talk.
• Bever, T. G. (2014, February). What every linguist knew about psychology in 1926. Ling.Soc.America special symposium,LSA.
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  This was a special presentation as part of a two day symposium on the 90th birthday of the LSA. Other presenters included Langendoen, Partee, etc,
• Bever, T. G. (2014, June). Different modes of knowing language. Invited Colloquium to the Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
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  A special lecture to the speech and psychology departments at the School (actually a super universityZ).
• Bever, T. G., & Mahmoud, A. (2014, March). A general problem-solving model resolves two contemporary conflicting approaches to L1 acquisition of syntax.. American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL).
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  This talk presented the application to Arabic language acquisition of the acquisition model I have proposed in several places – with acquisition based on the (logical) alternation between inductive (frequency based templates) and deductive (structural derivations) processes. Mahmoud worked out some basic examples in Arabic of how it works, with a few bits of data to support it.
• Bever, T. G., Forster, K., & Bell, D. (2014, December). Neurological responses to indirect primes. UA/ASU cognitive science conclave.
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  Initial analysis of an EEG study of category decision responses to target words in a masked form priming study, eg deciding with “dog” is in the category “animal” and not in another category, e.g. “vehicle”. The brief masked primes were letter sequences either slightly misspelled words in the category, (e.g., “horz”) or not in the target category (e.g., “tractr”). It showed a general N400 to targets not in the target category, and faster target word responses when the primes were in the same category.

Poster Presentations

• Bever, T. G., & Hancock, R. (2015, October). The effects of familial handedness on cognitive processes in right handers. 7th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.
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  A review of several different kinds of accumulated research reports, behavioral, fMRI and EEG, supporting the behavioral and neurological differences between people with and without familial left handedness. It garnered quite a bit of attention.
• Bever, T. G., Forster, K., & Bell, D. (2015, October). Early and late neurological responses to preconscious form and semantic information in lexical category decision.. 7th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language..
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  An even further analysis of the category-priming study, emphasizing aspects related to neurolinguistics. The results replicated previous findings and analyses. In addition, the surprising findings include the fact that there are latency differences of the EEG signal at only 200 msec after the masked prime: congruent prime-target category stimuli reach a sooner peak around 200msec than incongruent prime-target category stimuli: this suggests further that the prime is already at least partially processed when the target appears and can immediately interact with the kind of target it is. This is further evidence for an incremental cascade network in lexical access which starts right away, rather than awaiting a gated threshold.
• Bell, D., Forster, K., & Bever, T. (2014, spring). Unconscious processes in masked form category priming. Cuny sentence processing conference, 2014.
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  An EEG investigation of category priming, showing effects of the masked prime on early EEG components of the response to the target word.

Case Studies

• Bever, T. G., & Others, V. (2014. ONGOING RESEARCH The Golden Mean and depth perception(pp 0-0).
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  This research explores the fact (now discovered by us) that the golden mean rectangle enhances depth perception. The study is now extensive, involving several hundred subjects in a range of converging paradigms.The study bears on confirmation of a general theory of aesthetics - what people prefer and enjoy. This theory was first developed by me to explain what motivates children intrinsically to learn abstract grammar - namely, learning grammar is an aesthetically enjoyable activity. This in turn explains certain properties of universal syntax - they are selected because they provide an enjoyable learning problem for children.In the fall of 2014, I submitted a confluence grant proposal (q.v.) on a set of cues used by artists to convey depth - including the golden mean, and other discoveries I have made in many classic landscape painters (foreground on lower left, diagonal moving from lower left to upper right). The proposal (with Keith Lehrer and Martina Shenal as co pis), was granted and research started in fall 2015, and is still underway. We are adding EEG brain imaging in response to frames of different ratios to the study.
• Bever, T. G., & Others, V. (2014. SIX ONGOING STUDIES OF FAMILIAL HANDEDNESS, LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND PSYCHOSIS(pp IRRELEVANT).
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  ASIDE FROM COLLABORATIONS WITH COOPERATING LABORATORIES (Q.V.) ON BEHAVIORAL AND NEUROLOGICAL EFFECTS OF FAMILIAL HANDEDNESS (FS)….ONGOING PROJECTS involving FS IN MY LAB INCLUDE:a) Responses to language and music in musicians and non musicians (experiment is almost finished). This builds on the comparison of ELAN and ERAN in language and music in FS+ andFS- non musicians. We are now comparing the differences we found, in musicians, since our earlier research has shown that musicians shift certain musical processes from the right to the left hemisphere. (With Sammler, Bell and an undergraduate, Carerra doing his honours thesis on it.b) Resting state connectivity as a function of FS. An earlier pilot study suggested that FS+ people have more inter hemispheric circuit correlations when the brain is at rest. This would be consistent with other resuts: we are replicating the study now. With Bell and Hancock.c) FS and brain structure differences revealed by Tensor analysis. Underway. This is a collaboration with Friederici and several postdocs at the Leipzig Planck. They have tensor analyses of 250 subjects, along with our familial handedness questionnaire. We are now analysing the genetic load for those subjects, and expect some initial results by the end of the summer of 2015.d) Schizophrenia, asymmetries and FS. (With Breitborde, a professor of Psychiatry). This is exploring the relation between auditory asymmetries, and FS, contrasting high-functioning schizophrenics and normals. The data are still being gradually collected . This will be the basis for external funding.e) FS and vulnerability to concussions in athletes. This is a beginning study of relative frequency and different outcomes in college athletes in relation to FS. IRBs prepared in 2014, study will probably get seriously started in summer of 2015. In collaboration with physicians connected to UA athletics.f) L2 learning and FS; testing the prediction that FS+ will learn vocabulary better than FS-, and conversely for syntactic patterns. Negotiations with departments of Arabic, and Chinese to gain access to their students' pedigrees and grades.