Professor Tamara Swaab

Research Interests

Our research focuses on the psychological and neural mechanisms of language comprehension. We examine how the brain makes sense of language in real time. We ask how listeners and readers predict what is coming next, how they cope when language is ambiguous or difficult to understand, and how attention, memory, and cognitive control shape comprehension. A growing focus of our work is multimodal language processing: how the brain combines speech with information from the face, lips, and meaningful gestures, and how these cues help us understand language in challenging listening situations. We are particularly interested in why these processes differ across people. We examine language comprehension across the lifespan and in monolingual and bilingual speakers, asking how factors such as age, language experience, hearing, and cognitive abilities influence prediction and the use of multimodal information. At the University of Birmingham, students have the opportunity to combine EEG/ERP, MEG, MRI, TMS, eye tracking, behavioral methods, and machine-learning approaches. By bringing together methods with complementary temporal, spatial, and causal strengths, we aim to understand not only when and where language information is represented in the brain, but also how different neural systems contribute to successful comprehension.

Scientific Inspiration

Professors Marta Kutas, Peter Hagoort, and Edward Chang have all influenced how I think about the neuroscience of language, in different ways and at different stages of my career. Marta Kutas’s discovery of the N400 opened up an entirely new way of studying meaning and prediction as language unfolds in real time, and her work has been a major influence on my own research. Peter Hagoort has been important in showing how psycholinguistic questions can be connected to larger questions about how language is implemented in the brain. More recently, I have been very inspired by Edward Chang’s work using direct recordings and stimulation of the human brain to get closer to questions of mechanism and causality. I think all three have helped push the field beyond simply asking where language happens in the brain toward understanding how it works.