Tim Beyer

Tim Beyer is a developmental psychologist with research interests in language development, language processing and comprehension, dialects, and real-time measures. His research focuses on language comprehension in both monolinguals and bilinguals. He primarily uses eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing and comprehension of language, with a specific focus on how language minority children make use of Standard American English grammatical morphology. Beyer is working on a project tentatively titled “Language processing and comprehension across varieties of American English.” His co-authored article “Misinterpretation of African American English BIN by adult speakers of Standard American English,” in Language and Communication (2015), looks at how speakers of standard American English misinterpret the meaning of “bin” when it is used by those speaking African American English. He suggests that teaching the difference between these two forms of English could begin to address some of the language-based difficulties African American children face in mainstream American classrooms. Other co-authored articles include "The Role of Orthographic Gender in Cognition" (Center for Research in Language Technical Report, 2008) and "Some Cues are Stronger than Others: The (non-)Interpretation of 3rd Person Present –as a Tense Marker by 6- and 7-year olds" (First Language, 2009). Beyer has taught classes including Introductory Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Experimental Methodology and Applied Statistics, Cross-Cultural Psychology, and Language Development.