Thomas G. Bever (born December 9, 1939) is a Regent's Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience at the University of Arizona.

He has been a leading figure in psycholinguistics, focusing on the cognitive and neurological bases of linguistic universals, among other pursuits.

in linguistics and psychology from Harvard University in 1961, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967; he studied with Noam Chomsky, George A. Miller, and Jean Piaget.

Bever is notable for his study of garden path sentences such as The horse raced past the barn fell,[1] as well as his analysis by synthesis model of sentence processing, developed with David Townsend.

[2] In recent decades, Bever has studied the differences in language processing between righthanders with familial handedness and righthanders without left-handed relatives.