Rate My Professor Thomas Bever

Thomas G. Bever is Regents Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, with joint appointments as Professor in Psychology, Cognitive Science - GIDP, Neuroscience - GIDP, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching - GIDP, Philosophy, Language-Reading and Culture, and Research Professor at Arizona Research Labs. He also holds the Endowed Chair in Consciousness Studies. Bever earned a B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology magna cum laude with highest honors in Linguistics in 1961 and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 1967, with his dissertation titled The Menomini Language and Leonard Bloomfield. His career highlights include founding and heading the psycholinguistics program at Columbia University from 1970 to 1985, founding and directing the Center for the Sciences of Language at the University of Rochester from 1980 to 1995, and serving as Head of the Linguistics Department at the University of Arizona from 1998 to 2001. Since joining the University of Arizona in 1995, he has been co-director of the Center for Consciousness Studies since 2018 and directs the Bever Language and Cognition Laboratory.

Bever's research specializations encompass biolinguistics and the causes of language universals, distinguishing language-specific properties from general cognition; sentence processing; language acquisition; genetic differences in neurological organization for cognition and language; cerebral asymmetries; consciousness; aesthetics; psychology of music; history of writing systems; and history of psycholinguistics. He founded and co-edited the journal Cognition from 1970 to 2005. Major awards and honors include the NIH Predoctoral Fellowship (1962-1964), election to the Harvard Society of Fellows (1964-1967), Guggenheim Fellowship (1967), Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study (1984-1985), Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Prize (2010), and Regents Professorship (2011-present). Key publications include The cognitive basis for linguistic structures (2014) and The Bio-psychology of language universals - the next years (2016) in Language Down the Garden Path (Oxford University Press), How Cognition Came into Being in Cognition (2021), and contributions to over 180 articles and books on language sciences and cognitive neurosciences. Bever has delivered invited lectures worldwide and shaped interdisciplinary programs in psycholinguistics and consciousness studies.