The Bever Language and Cognition Laboratory
University of Arizona Cognitive Science Program
Departments of Linguistics
Department of Psychology
My research has two primary directions, applied and theoretical. While they tend to support and enrich each other and there is some overlap in actual paradigms, I present them separately because of the difference in their implications. Students or others interested in more details should write me at tgb@u.arizona.edu for a full description of current projects.
Theoretical Linguistics and Psychology
The engine underlying much of my theoretical research is the perennial question: What is the source of linguistic universals? This is critical to the study of grammar, since we do not want to impute to grammar universals that have other sources. It has lead me into detailed analysis of topics superficially distant from linguistics: the bases for cerebral asymmetries in humans and animals, the nature of adult performance systems, the fundamental laws of learning abstract systems in humans and animals, group differences in cognitive processes (e.g., based on gender, or handedness), the nature of visual computational processes that comprise the evolved biological substrate for language, the formal (uncaused) components of abstract knowledge. The unifying thread of all this is the attempt to distill out the true linguistic universals.