David Swinney (April 21, 1946 – April 14, 2006) was a prominent psycholinguist. His research on language comprehension contributed to methodological advances in his field. Biography Swinney received his BA in Psychology at Indiana University in 1968, his MA in Language Disorders, Speech Pathology and Audiology (1969), and his PhD in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin (1974). Swinney's faculty positions included: Tufts University (Department of Psychology), Rutgers University (Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Departments), the City University of New York (Programs in Linguistics, Psychology, Speech and Hearing Science) and University of California, San Diego (Chair, Department of Psychology). Contributions to the field of psycholinguistics Cross-Modal Priming Task. The Cross-Modal Priming Task (CMPT), developed by David Swinney, is an online measure used to detect activation of lexical and syntactic information during sentence comprehension. Prior to Swinney's introduction of this methodology, studies of lexical access were largely procured by offline measures, such as a phoneme-monitoring task. In these measures, study participants were asked to respond to a syntactic or lexical ambiguity in a sentence only after the entire sentence had been comprehended. Since Swinney considered the system of resolving ambiguities to be an autonomous, fast, and mandatory process, he suggested that the “downstream” temporal delay between stimulus and response could contaminate results. The CMPT, therefore, was created to probe lexical access in real time. During this task, study participants heard recorded sentences containing lexical or syntactic ambiguities while seated in front of a computer screen. At the same moment when the ambiguous word or phrase was uttered, simultaneously a string of letters---either a word or a non-word---was flashed on the computer screen, and the participant was required to indicate whether it was a word or not, by pressing one of two buttons on a computer keyboard. The uttered words had an ambiguous meaning or were an ambiguous phrase (for example: "mouse" - which could be understood as an animal or as a computer input device). The words shown on the screen - when they were actual lexical words (and not non-words), could be related to one of the meanings of the uttered word or phrase (for example, on the screen the written word could be "animal", or "computer"), or the written word on the screen could be a control word or phrase, unrelated to the uttered word or phrase (for example, "sun"). Study participants were then asked