Contact Information

Department of Experimental Psychology
Ghent University
Henri Dunantlaan 2
B-9000 Ghent, Belgium

Tel:  ++32 (0)9 264 64 10
Fax:  ++32 (0)9 264 64 96

Timothy DOT Desmet AT ugent DOT be
desmet AT mit DOT edu

CV

Titels

2003                   Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium
1999                   M.A. in Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium
1996                   B.A. in Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium
 

Positions

2006 - 2009         Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders
2003 - 2006         Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders
1999 - 2003         Research Assistant of the Research Foundation - Flanders
 

Stays Abroad

2005                   Visiting Post-Doc, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA (10 months)
2004                   Visiting Scientist, Cognitive Science Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI (4 months)
2003                   Visiting Scientist, Cognitive Science Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI (4 months)
2000                   Visiting Scholar, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA (10 months)

Research Interests

My research program involves the study of the cognitive representations and processes that are involved in sentence comprehension and production. Within this program, my research has focused on (1) the role of structural and non-structural constraints on syntactic ambiguity resolution, (2) the correspondence between sentence comprehension and sentence production, (3) the importance of previous experience with syntactic structures, (4) pronoun resolution, and (5) the role of working memory in sentence processing. I have studied these topics mainly through the eye-tracking methodology, self-paced reading experiments, sentence production tasks and natural text corpus analyses.

Publications

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D.Z., & Ferreira, F. (accepted for publication). The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: A psychometric approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Drieghe, D., Desmet, T., & Brysbaert, M. (in press). How important are linguistic factors in word skipping during reading? British Journal of Psychology.

Desmet, T., & Declercq, M. (2006). Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 610-632. pdf

Desmet, T., De Baecke, C., Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., & Vonk, W. (2006). Relative clause attachment in Dutch: On-line comprehension corresponds to corpus frequencies when lexical variables are taken into account. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(4), 453-485. pdf

Gibson, E., Desmet, T., Watson, D., Grodner, D., & Ko, K. (2005). Reading relative clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 16(2), 313-353.

Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2005). Parafoveal-on-foveal effects on eye movements in text reading: Does an extra space make a difference? Vision Research, 45, 1693-1706. pdf

Wolf, F., Gibson, E., & Desmet, T. (2004). Discourse coherence and pronoun resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes, 19, 665-675. pdf

Duyck, W., Desmet, T., Verbeke, L., & Brysbaert, M. (2004). WordGen: A tool for word selection and non-word generation in Dutch, German, English, and French. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 488-499. pdf

Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., Desmet, T., & De Baecke, C. (2004). Word skipping in reading: On the interplay of linguistic and visual factors. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16, 79-103. pdf

Desmet, T., & Gibson, E. (2003). Disambiguation preferences and corpus frequencies in noun phrase conjunction. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(3), 353-374. pdf

Desmet, T., De Baecke, C., & Brysbaert, M. (2002). The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch. Memory & Cognition, 30(1), 150-157. pdf

Desmet, T., Brysbaert, M., & De Baecke, C. (2002). The correspondence between sentence production and corpus frequencies in modifier attachment. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55A (3), 879-896. pdf

Kemps, E., De Rammelaere, S., & Desmet, T. (2000). The development of working memory: Exploring the complementarity of two models. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 77, 89-109. pdf

Talks

Desmet, T. (2005). Priming of Syntactic Configurational Information. Invited talk at the Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. March, Amherst, MA, USA. March 15, Amherst, MA, USA.

Desmet, T. (2006). The role of experience in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Invited talk at the Departmental Seminars of the Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow. February 10, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

Desmet, T. (2005). Syntactic priming of attachments. Talk at the Department of Linguistics and Philosphy, Masschusetts Institute of Technology. December 2, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Desmet, T., & Ferreira, F. (2004). The time course of implicit causality information. Talk at the workshop Psycholinguistics in Flanders, Center for Psycholinguistics, University of Antwerp. June 24-25, Antwerp, Belgium.

Desmet, T., De Baecke, C., Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., & Vonk, W. (2004). Relative clause attachment in Dutch: On-line reading preferences correspond to corpus frequencies when lexical variables are taken into account. Talk at the 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, University of Maryland. March 25-27, College Park, MD, USA.

Desmet, T. & Gibson, E. (2002). Comprehension complexity and corpus frequencies in noun phrase conjunction. Talk at the Experimental Psychology Conference (A joint meeting of the EPS, UK, and the BVP-SBP, Belgium), Leuven University. April 9-11, Leuven, Belgium.

Desmet, T. & Gibson, E. (2002). The complexity and frequency of NP conjunctions. Talk at the workshop Psycholinguistics in Flanders, Center for Psycholinguistics, University of Antwerp. April 26, Antwerp, Belgium.

Collaborations

Marc Brysbaert, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Chuck Clifton, University of Massachusetts, MA, USA

Denis Drieghe, Ghent University, Belgium

Wouter Duyck, Ghent University, Belgium

Daniel Grodner, Brown University, RI, USA

Ev Fedorenko, MIT, MA, USA

Fernanda Ferreira, Michigan State University, MI, USA

Ted Gibson, MIT, MA, USA

Sofie Schoonbaert, Ghent University, Belgium

Ben Swets, Michigan State University, MI, USA

Duane Watson, University of Rochester, NY, USA

Florian Wolf, University of Cambridge, UK

Memberships & Services

Reviewer for international journals
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Journal of Memory and Language
Language and Cognitive Processes
Memory and Cognition
Psychological Science
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Reviewer for research foundations
US National Science Foundation
UK Economic and Social Research Council

Reviewer for international conferences on sentence processing
AMLaP
CUNY

Member of the Scientific Committee and the Organizing Committe of the AMLaP-2005 Conference

Member of the Ethical Committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University (2003-2006)

Member of the Belgian Psychological Society and the Belgian Federation of Psychologists (1999-2006)

Poster Presentations and Co-Authored Talks

2005

Desmet, T., & Declercq, M. (2005). Cross-linguistic syntactic priming of relative clause attachment. Poster presented at the 18th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 31-April 2, Tucson, Arizona, USA.

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Clifton, C., & Ferreira, F. (2005). Adjunct attachment isn't just race either. Poster presented at the 18th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 31-April 2, Tucson, Arizona, USA.

 

2004

Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, Z., & Ferreira, F. (2004). Does implicit prosodic "chunking" mediate individual differences in relative clause attachment preferences? Poster presented at the 10th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP). September, 16-18, Aix en Provence, France.

Duyck, W., Desmet, T., Verbeke, L., & Brysbaert, M. (2004). WordGen: A tool for word selection and non-word generation in Dutch, English, German, and French. Poster presented at the 10th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP). September, 16-18, Aix en Provence, France.

Duyck, W., Desmet, T., Verbeke, L., & Brysbaert, M. (2004). WordGen: A tool for word selection and non-word generation in Dutch, German, English, and French. Paper presented at the workshop Psycholinguistic in Flanders, June 24-25, Antwerp, Belgium.

Vanderelst, D., Duyck, W., Desmet, T., & Hartsuiker, R. (2004). A comparison of the written word frequency effect in L1 and L2. Paper presented at the workshop Psycholinguistics in Flanders. June 24-25, Antwerp, Belgium.

Desmet, T., & Ferreira, F. (2004). Implicit causality as an inherent feature of verbs and verb classes. Poster presented at the 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. March 25-27, College Park, MD, USA.

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 Sentence Processing. March 25-27, College Park, MD, USA.

 

2003

Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2003). The effect of an extra blank space on eye movement control in reading. Paper presented at the 13th Conference of ESCOP (European Society for Cognitive Psychology). September 17-20, Granada Spain.

Desmet, T., & Ferreira, F. (2003). Implicit causality as an inherent feature of verbs and verb classes. Poster presented at the 8th Annual AMLaP Conference. August 25-27, Glasgow, UK.

Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2003). The effect of an extra blank space on eye movement control in reading. Paper presented at the 12th European Conference on Eye Movements. August 20-24, Dundee, Uk.

Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2003). The effect of an extra blank space on eye movement control in reading. Paper presented at the workshop Psycholinguistics in Flanders. June 19-20, Ghent, Belgium.

Wolf, F., Gibson, T., & Desmet, T. (2003). The influence of coherence relations on processing pronouns. Poster presented at the 16th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. March 27-29, Cambridge, MA, USA.

 

2002

De Baecke, C., Desmet, T., Drieghe, D., & Brysbaert, M. (2002). The influence of humanness in on-line sentence processing: Results from Dutch. Poster presented at the 7th Annual AMLaP Conference. September 19-21, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.

De Baecke, C., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2002). De ambigue aanhechting van betrekkelijke bijzinnen: een corpusstudie. Paper presented at the Pre-doc workshop Psycholinguistiek. April 26, UFSIA, Antwerpen, Belgium.

Desmet, T. & Gibson, E. (2002). Comprehension complexity and corpus frequencies in noun phrase conjunction. Poster presented at the 15th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. March 21-23, New York, NY, USA.

 

2001

Desmet, T., Brysbaert, M., & De Baecke, C. (2001). The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch. Poster presented at the 14th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. March 15-17, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

De Baecke, C., De Poorter, A., Desmet, T., Brysbaert, M., & Drieghe, D. (2001). Methodological concerns in research on discourse factors: Do we need filler items? Poster presented at the 14th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. March 15-17, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

 

2000

De Baecke, C., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2000). The importance of structural and non-structural variables in modifier attachment: A corpus study in Dutch. Poster presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP 2000). September 20-23, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Desmet, T., Brysbaert, M., & De Baecke, C. (2000). Modifier attachment in Dutch: Does sentence production mirror coherent text writing?. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Belgian Psychological Society. May 12, Liege, Belgium.

De Baecke, C., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2000). Lexical and structural variables in modifier attachment: A corpus study in Dutch. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Belgian Psychological Society. May 12, Liege, Belgium.

Desmet, T., Brysbaert, M., & De Baecke, C. (2000). The correspondence between sentence production and corpus frequencies in modifier attachment. Poster presented at the 13th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. March 30 - April 1, La Jolla, CA, USA.

De Baecke, C., Brysbaert, M., & Desmet, T. (2000). Lexical and structural variables in modifier attachment: A corpus study in Dutch. Poster presented at the 13th Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. March 30 - April 1, La Jolla, CA, USA.

 

1999

Desmet, T., Brysbaert, M., & Mitchell, D. C. (1999). Testing exposure-based models of human parsing in Dutch. Poster presented at the 7th Wintercongres (NVP). December 17-18, Egmond-aan-Zee, The Netherlands.

Desmet, T., Brysbaert, M., & Mitchell, D. C. (1999). Modifier attachment in Dutch: Assessing the merits of the Tuning Hypothesis. Poster presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP 1999). September 23-25, Edinburgh, UK.

Desmet, T., & Brysbaert, M. (1999). The value of the letter search task for visual word recognition. Poster presented at the 11th conference of ESCOP. September 1-4, Ghent, Belgium.

Desmet, T., & Brysbaert, M. (1999). Letter priming and lexical influences in repetition priming. Poster presented\ at the Annual Meeting of the Belgian Psychological Society. May 20, Ghent, Belgium.

Kemps, E., De Rammelaere, S., & Desmet, T. (1999). Spatial short-term memory in children: Investigating the complementarity of two working memory models. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Belgian Psychological Society. May 20, Ghent, Belgium.

 

1998

Desmet, T., & Brysbaert, M. (1998). The role of consonants and vowels and their position in visual word processing. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Belgian Psychology Society. May 8, Leuven, Belgium.