Benjamin Swets

Benjamin Swets
Postdoctoral Associate

Department of Psychology
State University of New York at Stony Brook

Research Interests:

My research engages several topics across both language production and comprehension, but 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. It is my desire to explore the link between higher level and lower level aspects of cognition and language processing, and to view language as a process that requires the real-time integration of information. How the 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 incrementality in language production, working memory constraints on language comprehension, the influence of situational goals and real-time pressures on language processes, and the use of prospective memory to recover from interruptions. This program of research dovetails with many different branches of the cognitive sciences, including linguistics, human factors, and the psychological areas of memory, attention, visual cognition, and executive control.

Publications:

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Clifton, C., & Ferreira, F. (2008). Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities: Evidence from self-paced reading. Memory and Cognition, 36, 201-216. (.pdf)
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. (.pdf)
Swets, B. (2006). “Where was I?”: A psycholinguistic investigation of conversational interruptions. Doctoral dissertation. (.pdf)
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. (.doc)
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 & Language, 46, 57-84. (.pdf)

Conference Presentations:

Swets, B., Gerrig, R. J., Jacovina, M. E., & Wenzel, W. G. (2007). Sentence production in monologue and dialogue: The scope of planning. Poster presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA.
Swets, B., Ferreira, F., & Altmann, E. M. (2007). "Where was I": A psycholinguistic investigation of interruptions to language production. Paper presented at the 13th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Turku, Finland.
Swets, B., Ferreira, F., & Altmann, E. M. (2006). "Where was I": A psycholinguistic investigation of interruptions to language production. Paper presented at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Houston, TX. (.ppt)
Swets, B., Ferreira, F., & Altmann, E. M. (2006). "Where was I": A psycholinguistic investigation of interruptions to language production. Poster presented at the 20th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.
Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D. Z., & Ferreira, F. (2005). The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: A psychometric approach. Paper presented at the 11th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Ghent, Belgium.
Swets, B., Desmet, T., Clifton, C., Jr., & Ferreira, F. (2005). Adjunct attachment isn't just a race, either. Poster presented at the 19th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Tucson, AZ.
Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D. Z., & Ferreira, F. (2004). The role of working memory in attachment preferences. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN.
Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D. Z., & Ferreira, F. (2004). Does implicit prosodic "chunking" mediate individual differences in relative clause attachment preferences? Poster presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing meeting, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D. Z., & Ferreira, F. (2004). The role of verbal and spatial working memory in relative clause attachment preferences. Poster presented at the 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, College Park, MD.
Ferreira, F. & Swets, B. (2003). The production and comprehension of resumptive pronouns in relative clause "island" contexts. Paper presented at the Max Planck Institute's Four Corners Workshop Series, Workshop 2: The relationship between language comprehension and language production, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Swets, B., & Ferreria, F. (2003). The effect of time pressure on the production of resumptive pronoun relative clauses. Poster presented at the 16th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Cambridge, MA.
Ferreira, F. & Swets, B. (2002). Incrementality in language production: Evidence from island violations. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Kansas City, MO.
Ferreira, F. & Swets, B. (2002). The scope of syntactic planning in language production. Poster presented at the 15th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.
Ferreira, F. & Swets, B.(2000). How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New Orleans, LA.

Teaching:

Teaching assistant, Introduction to Psychology, Michigan State University, Fall 2000.
Teaching assistant, Introduction to Psychology, Michigan State University, Spring 2001.
Coursework, Teaching of Psychology, Michigan State University, Summer 2005
Instructor, Cognitive Psychology, Summer 2005

Education:

Ph.D., 2007, Michigan State University, Psychology
M.A., 2003, Michigan State University, Psychology
B.A., 1999, Hope College, Psychology/Philosophy

Lab Affiliations:

Mailing Address:

Department of Psychology
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11776

email: bswets // notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Updated 3/17/08