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Willem Johannes Maria Levelt | |
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Born | |
Education | Universiteit Leiden |
Spouse(s) | Elisabeth, C.M. Jacobs |
Children | Claartje, Philip, Christiaan |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psycholinguistics |
Institutions | Nijmegen |
Thesis | On Binocular Rivalry (1965) |
Doctoral advisor | Johannes Petrus van de Geer |
Doctoral students | Peter Hagoort |
Website | http://www.mpi.nl/people/levelt-pim |
Willem Johannes Maria (Pim) Levelt (born 17 May 1938 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch psycholinguist. He is a researcher of human language acquisition and speech production. He developed a comprehensive theory of the cognitive processes involved in the act of speaking, including the significance of the "mental lexicon". Levelt was the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He also served as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences between 2002 and 2005, [1] of which he has been a member since 1978. [2] [3]
Levelt studied psychology at Leiden University. He worked experimentally for five months under Albert Michotte at the University of Louvain. In 1965, he received his doctorate (cum laude) with John P. van de Geer with a thesis on binocular rivalry. He then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies.
Since 1966, Levelt taught and researched at the University of Illinois, the University of Groningen and the Radboud University Nijmegen. In 1968, he became director of the Institute for General Psychology at the University of Groningen and in the following year, he received a full professorship for Experimental Psychology and Psycholinguistics .
From 1971 to 1972, Levelt remained a member of the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, New Jersey. There he wrote his work Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics, first published in 1974. Then he received a professorship in Experimental Psychology at the Radboud University Nijmegen.
From 1976, Levelt headed the newly founded project group for psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Society in Nijmegen. In 1980, he received a professorship for psycholinguistics there and became founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. From 2002 to 2005, he was President of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.
In June 2006, Levelt retired. During his career, he has supervised 58 dissertations.
Language processing is about cognitive processes of language production and language reception. In psycholinguistics, Levelt is best known for his model of language production. Speaking is one of the most complex psychomotor functions of humans. For Levelt, the aim of an utterance lies in the realization of communicative intentions. [4] These communicative intentions are a subset of all the speaker's intentions in a given situation. The processes of speech production are largely automatic and take place in a matter of milliseconds. There are now two alternative basic concepts for the language production process; namely, in addition to the modular-serial approach represented by Levelt, an interactive-connectionist approach as a counter-position. In Levelt's modular model, it is assumed that the processes of each processing stage must be completed before the next processes can be started. In an analogy to computer language, Levelt distinguishes between memory and process components. Two memory modules accommodate the so-called mental lexicon. One memory module accommodates the only vaguely described lemmata, the other the world and situational knowledge. [4]
In June 1963, Levelt married the musician Elisabeth Jacobs, with whom he had three children, Claartje, Philip and Christiaan.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Stephen C. Levinson FBA is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Mark Jerome Steedman, is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located in Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands. The institute was founded in 1980 by Pim Levelt, and is unique for being entirely dedicated to psycholinguistics, and is also one of the few institutes of the Max Planck Society to be located outside Germany. The Nijmegen-based institute currently occupies 5th position in the Ranking Web of World Research Centers among all Max Planck institutes. It currently employs about 235 people.
Processability theory is a theory of second language acquisition developed by Manfred Pienemann. The theory has been used as a framework by scientists from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
Elena Lieven is a British psychology and linguistics researcher and educator. She was a senior research scientist in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology in Leipzig, Germany. She is also a professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester where she is director of its Child Study Centre and leads the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD).
Jeroen van de Weijer is a Dutch linguist who teaches phonology, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and other courses at Shenzhen University, where he is Distinguished Professor of English linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages. Before, he was Full Professor of English Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University, in the School of English Studies.
Angela Friederici is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in neuropsychology and linguistics. She is the author of over 400 academic articles and book chapters, and has edited 15 books on linguistics, neuroscience, language and psychology.
Pieter Albertus Maria Seuren was a Dutch linguist, emeritus professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen.
Elizabeth Anne CutlerFRS FBA FASSA was an Australian psycholinguist, who served as director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. A pioneer in her field, Cutler's work focused on human listeners' recognition and decoding of spoken language. Following her retirement from the Max Planck Institute in 2012, she took a professorship at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University.
Harold Bekkering is a Dutch professor of cognitive psychology at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour of the Radboud University Nijmegen. His research has covered many different ways of learning, ranging from basic sensorimotor learning to complex forms of social learning. Lately, he aims to implement knowledge about human learning in educational settings.
Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist, author, and educator. She is also the Head of the Endangered Languages Archive.
Antje Susanne Meyer is a German-Dutch experimental psychologist, known for her work in language production. She is currently one of the scientific directors of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and also a professor of individual differences in language processing at Radboud University.
Asifa Majid is a psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist who is professor of language, communication and cultural cognition at the University of Oxford, UK.
Aslı Özyürek is a linguist, cognitive scientist and psychologist. She is professor at the Center for Language Sciences and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen, and incoming Director of the Multimodal Language Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Caroline F. Rowland is a British psychologist known for her work on child first language development, grammar acquisition, and the role of environment in child's language growth. Since 2016, she has been the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds the position of Professor of First Language Acquisition by Special Appointment at Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has also been an Honorary Research Associate in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool since 2018.
Mark Dingemanse is a Dutch linguist and an Africanist. He is an associate professor in Language and Communication at the Centre for Language Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen. Dingemanse obtained a MA degree in African Languages and Cultures at Leiden University in 2006, and a PhD degree in arts in 2011 at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is also a Senior Investigator in the Multimodal Language and Cognition research group at the Nijmegen Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Dingemanse performed linguistic fieldwork in eastern Ghana and did comparative research on various languages. He is principal investigator of the research programme Elementary Particles of Conversation, on the small words in everyday language. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded Dingemans a Heineken Young Scientists Award in 2020.
Mirjam Ernestus is professor of psycholinguistics and scientific director of the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Wolfgang Klein is a German linguist and a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He's known for his contributions in language acquisition, text analysis and studies on the semantics of time and space.
Peter Hagoort is a Dutch neuroscientist who studies the neurobiology of language.