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Willem Johannes Maria Levelt | |
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 Levelt in October 2014 | |
| Born | (1938-05-17)17 May 1938 (age 87) |
| 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) is a Dutchpsycholinguist. He is a researcher of humanlanguage acquisition andspeech production. He developed a comprehensive theory of thecognitive processes involved in the act ofspeaking, including the significance of the "mental lexicon". Levelt was the founding director of theMax Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics inNijmegen. He also served as president of theRoyal 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 atLeiden University. He worked experimentally for five months underAlbert Michotte at theUniversity of Louvain. In 1965, he received his doctorate (cum laude) withJohn P. van de Geer with a thesis onbinocular rivalry. He then spent a year as apostdoctoral fellow at theHarvard Center for Cognitive Studies.
Since 1966, Levelt taught and researched at theUniversity of Illinois, theUniversity of Groningen and theRadboud University Nijmegen. In 1968, he became director of the Institute for General Psychology at theUniversity 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 theInstitute for Advanced StudyPrinceton, New Jersey. There he wrote his workFormal 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 theMax 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 theKoninklijke 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.[citation needed]
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