Rate My Professor Thomas Bever

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.