Willem Levelt

Willem Johannes Maria Levelt ( born May 17, 1938 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch Psycholinguist.

  • Lemma 3.2.1
  • 3.2.2 word form

Life and work

Levelt studied psychology at the University of Leiden. In June 1963, he married the musician Elizabeth Jacobs, with whom he has three children Claartje, Philip and Christiaan. Five months worked Levelt experimentally Albert Michotte at the University of Leuven. In 1965 he earned his doctorate under John P. van de Geer with a thesis on binocular rivalry cum laude. He spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. Since 1966, he taught and conducted research at the University of Illinois, the University of Groningen and the Radboud University in Nijmegen. He became director of the Institute of General Psychology at the University of Groningen in 1968 and received in the following year a full professor of experimental psychology and psycholinguistics.

1971 to 1972 he remained as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There he wrote his book Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics, which was first published in 1974. Then he became Professor of Experimental Psychology at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

From 1976 on he headed the newly founded project group for Psycholinguistics of the Max Planck Society in Nijmegen. In 1980 he was appointed professor of psycholinguistics and was 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 he became Professor Emeritus. He has supervised 58 doctoral theses.

Speech production as a research priority

In speech processing, it is about cognitive processes of speech production and speech reception. In psycholinguistics Levelt is primarily known for his model of speech production. Speaking is one of the most complex psychomotor performance of humans. For Levelt is the target of an utterance in the realization of communicative intentions. This communicative intentions are a subset of all the intentions of a speaker in a given situation. The processes of language production in this case run mostly automatic and take place in the range of milliseconds. There are speech production process now two alternative basic concepts, namely next to the position taken by Levelt - serial modular approach as a counter - interactively a connectionist approach. In Levelt's modular model it is assumed that the processes of individual processing steps must be completed before the next processes are started. Levelt differs for computer language between storage and processing components in a correspondence. Two memory modules accommodate the so-called mental lexicon. The one memory module houses the only vaguely described lemmas, the other the world and situation knowledge.

The process components

Levelt distinguishes his part in the process of speech production in three main stages, namely, first, conceptualization, which is responsible for the pre-verbal concept formation, secondly, the formulation that handles the grammatical and phonological encoding of lemmas, and thirdly, the articulation.

Conceptualization

According Levelt, it is the aim of all conceptual processes to create a pre-verbal message, which can then be transferred to a surface structure. The pre-verbal message must be in a format, which can then be subsequently processed in the next stage of the formulation. At the stage of conceptualization of the content of the utterance is determined. It is decided what is said. There are listeners ' expectations into account and it is chosen the type of speech act, decided, for example, between question and request. In the conceptualization Levelt differs further sub- stages, namely the " Bookkeeping " and the " macro planning" and the " micro- planning ". With the micro planning a spoken utterance can already be started before all the processes of Makroplanens have been completed. Levelt but on the other hand, to take influences from the area of ​​Mikroplanens on the macro planning. The sequence of the processes is set and so is only in one direction.

Bookkeeping

As the " Bookkeeping " means Levelt that a speaker in a conversational situation initially represents different aspects of the discourse. Information about the discourse situation to be involved in the planning of utterances, for example, the type of discourse, whether it is on an equal footing, informal discussion or be more formal communicative situations. Also, the previous conversation history, its previous contents and the information that can be assumed to be known at the receiver are considered. Speaker and listener go ideally from the same Topik, so the same topic of the discourse. New and important information are the focus.

Macro planning

When it comes to macro planning the implementation of policies for achieving a communicative goal intentions of the speaker in speech acts. Complex intentions are decomposed into various sub - or sub-goals that have multiple speech acts result. Information to be communicated is selected. On questions of the interlocutor long-term memory is searched for content. The speaker can be guided by the context and of what stands in its focus. Subsequently, the sequencing of this information takes place. It depends on the limitations of working memory to the speaker and the listener, as well as from the natural order of the content. Events and processes a natural sequence are sequenced according to this order. The result of the planning macro is a sequence of speech - intentions, which are then further processed in the context of the micro- scheduling.

'The result of macro planning is a speech -act intention, or a series of speech -act intentions. The speaker selects and orders information Whose expression with declarative, interrogative, or imperative mood will be instrumental in Realizing the goals did proceed from the original communicative intention. In other words, macro planning Produces the substance of the message, as did the searching message shoulderstand declare a Particular proposition or interrogate A Certain state of affairs. "

Micro planning

In the micro- planning, the individual speech act intentions that were created by processes of Makroplanens, further processed into pre-verbal messages. For example, now the speakers will be checked, so the objects to which the linguistic expression refers: How accessible are the speakers yet? Diving speakers new to the discourse? Important or recently introduced in the discourse referents are more accessible. It also determines what information is Topik, so goes with the theme of the discourse. Then, taking into account a certain perspective, a message is propositionalisiert. It is therefore referred to something (reference) and says something about it ( predication ). The pre-verbal message is now available in a format that can be processed further in the formulation.

Formulation

In the formulation, the conceptual structure, so the contents of the planned utterance is converted into a specific language structure. Suitable entries in the mental lexicon are activated. It carried out the construction of a syntactic structure and the transformation into a phonological representation. In formulating each new piece of the preverbal message is used to advance the grammatical encoding. The order in which to create the parts of the preverbal message, it affects the syntactic structure. In the formulation to distinguish the grammatical and phonological encoding as further sub- stages. In the center of the scientific debate on the grammatical encoding is whether the lexical access takes place in one or in two stages. Experimental findings support the two-stage theory of lexical access. Here, at first only semantic and syntactic information lexical entries are activated. In a second phase, only their phonological forms are activated. So Levelt assumes that the process of lexical selection is a discrete two-step process. Succession must be accessed in two different lexical representations: on lemma and word form.

Lemma

In a first Lexikalisierungsschritt is accessed in the mental lexicon to a lemma. Lemmas are in Levelt's terminology modality - unspecific permanent representations of the syntactic features of a word. In Levelt also aspects of meaning of a word in the lemma were originally represented. In the newer version of the theory, the meaning is represented in a separate network of lexical concepts, which combine the semantic attributes of a concept. On Lemmaebene only the syntactic features of a word are represented. The selection of a lexical entry takes place on Lemmaebene. The connections between the two levels of the lemmas and word forms are exclusively directed forward and not back. On the part of phonological representations can no influence on the lexical selection are taken.

Word form

The selected lemma activates its corresponding word form. It bridges the gap between conceptual and phonological processing is overcome. At the level of the word forms no more than a word form is activated at a time. Only with words with high similarity of word meaning, the synonyms, there may be a parallel activation on word form level. By accessing the morpho - phonological word forms the phonological segments as well as a metric frames are available. The segments are fitted in a next step in this metric frame.

Articulation

During the articulation finally the phonological representation is converted into motor activity. The articulation module is the preparation and starting up the speech motor control. The result is then the actual utterance that you hear. The speaker is at the same time act as its own listener. He can focus his attention on his own speaking and so what he says just check the form and content go. The high speed, is produced with the language based on the parallel processing according to Levelt. The various modules are all working simultaneously. Is already articulated during an utterance, the speaker is already thinking about what he will say next. Frequently the utterance of a sentence starts before even planned the entire contents.

Memberships and Honors

  • Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences
  • Member of the Holland Society of Sciences
  • Member of the Academia Europaea
  • Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (since 1993)
  • Member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
  • Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
  • Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
  • Member of the National Academy of Sciences
  • Member of the American Philosophical Society
  • Honorary member of De Jonge Akademie
  • Member of the Cognitive Science Society
  • Honorary doctorate from the University of Maastricht (2000)
  • Honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp (2003)
  • Honorary doctorate from the University of Padua (2004)
  • Honorary doctorate from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (2005)
  • Radboud Stichting Prize ( 1968)
  • Hendrik Muller Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences ( 1993)
  • Heymans Prize of Dutch Psychology Association (NIP ) ( 1996)
  • Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw (1998)
  • Silver Medal of the Radboud University of Nijmegen (2004)
  • Honorary Medal of the Netherlands Psychonomic Society ( 2006)
  • Foreign Member of the Order Pour le Mérite (2010)
  • Federal Cross of Merit with Star (2012 )

Writings

  • A history of psycholinguistics: the pre - chomskyan era. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.
  • Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics. [Nachdr d Out: The Hague: Mouton 1994 in 3 vols ]. Benjamins, Amsterdam 2008
  • Child language research in ESF countries: an inventory. European Science Foundation, Strasbourg 1981
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