Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

PSY 101 - Introductory Psychology
PSY 300 - Research Methods
PSY 357 - Psychology of Language
PSY 365 - Cognition

One overall theme drives much of my work: the ability of people using language to flexibly adapt to internal and external limitations. The different strategies available to people producing and comprehending language reveals a language system that is adaptive to many cognitive, environmental and task constraints. I view language as a processing system that requires the real-time integration of information. How this system can adapt to its environment could answer many unresolved questions of architecture in psycholinguistics. To this end, my past and current work has focused on such topics as the flexibility with which people plan sentences in advance, working memory constraints on language comprehension and production, and the influence of situational goals and real-time pressures on language processes.

Swets, B., & Ivanova, I. (2022). Working memory and speech planning. In J. Schwieter & E. Wen (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Working Memory and Language. Cambridge University Press.

Swets, B., Petrone, C., Fuchs, S., & Krivokapić, J. (2021). A cross-linguistic study of individual differences in speech planning. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 1439. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.655516

Ivanova, I., Horton, W.S., Swets, B., Kleinman, D., & Ferreira, V. S (2020). Structural alignment in dialogue and monologue (and what attention may have to do with it). Journal of Memory and Language, 110, 104052.

Swets, B., & Kurby, C. A. (2016). Eye movements reveal the influence of event structure on reading behavior. Cognitive Science, 40, 466–480. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12240

Swets, B., Jacovina, M. E., & Gerrig, R. J. (2014). Individual differences in the scope of speech planning: Evidence from eye movements. Language and Cognition, 6, 12-44.

Swets, B., Jacovina, M. E., & Gerrig, R. J. (2013). Effects of conversational pressures on speech planning. Discourse Processes, 50, 23-51.

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Clifton, C., & Ferreira, F. (2008). Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities: Evidence from self-paced reading. Memory and Cognition, 36, 201-216.

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D. Z., & Ferreira, F. (2007). The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: A psychometric approach. Journal of Experiment Psychology: General, 136, 64-81.

Ferreira, F., & Swets, B. (2005). The production and comprehension of resumptive pronouns in relative clause "island" contexts. In A. Cutler (Ed.), Twenty-first Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones (pp. 263-278). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ferreira, F. & Swets, B. (2002). How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 57-84.