Willem Johannes Maria Levelt
Levelt in October 2014
Born (1938-05-17) 17 May 1938
Amsterdam
EducationUniversiteit Leiden
Spouse(s)Elisabeth, C.M. Jacobs
ChildrenClaartje, Philip, Christiaan
Scientific career
FieldsPsycholinguistics
InstitutionsNijmegen
ThesisOn Binocular Rivalry (1965)
Doctoral advisorJohannes Petrus van de Geer
Doctoral studentsPeter Hagoort
Websitehttp://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]

Education and career

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.

Speech production as a research focus

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]

Personal

In June 1963, Levelt married the musician Elisabeth Jacobs, with whom he had three children, Claartje, Philip and Christiaan.

Affiliations and honors

Publications

  • A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (PDF). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013.
  • Formal Grammars in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 2008.
    • Volume 1: An Introduction to the Theory of Formal Languages and Automata
    • Volume 2: Applications in Linguistic Theory
    • Volume 3: Psycholinguistic Applications
  • Lexical access in speech production. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 1993.
  • Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1989.
  • Child language research in ESF countries: an inventory. Strasbourg: European Science Foundation. 1981.

Further reading - About Pim Levelt

Notes

  1. ↑ Levelt received the Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste in person from the President of Germany on 30 May 2011.

References

  1. ↑ "KNAW-lid Pim Levelt benoemd tot lid van de Orden Pour le Mérite" (in Dutch). Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. 26 May 2011. Archived from the original on 16 May 2020.
  2. ↑ Enserink, Martin (28 November 2012), "Final Report: Stapel Affair Points to Bigger Problems in Social Psychology", Science, retrieved 29 April 2023
  3. ↑ "Pim Levelt". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016.
  4. 1 2 Levelt, Willem (1989). Speaking. From intention to articulation. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
  5. ↑ "Prof. Dr. Willem J.M. Levelt" (in German). German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Archived from the original on 16 May 2020.
  6. ↑ "Prof. Dr. phil. Dr. h. c. mult Willem J.M. Levelt". Austrian Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 16 May 2020.
  7. ↑ "Willem J. M. Levelt". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 24 March 2019.
  8. ↑ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. American Philosophical Society. Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  9. ↑ "Willem J.M. Levelt" (in German). orden-pourlemerite.de. Archived from the original on 12 December 2015.
  10. ↑ "Auszeichnung mit Tradition" (in German). Archive of the Bundesregierung. 30 May 2011. Archived from the original on 16 May 2020.


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