Willem Levelt

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.

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

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.

He also served as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences between 2002 and 2005, of which he has been a member since 1978.

Levelt studied psychology at Leiden University.

He worked experimentally for five months under Albert Michotte at the University of Louvain.

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.

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.