Willem Levelt

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Willem Levelt (1970)

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

Live and act

Levelt studied psychology at the University of Leiden . In June 1963 he married the musician Elisabeth Jacobs, with whom he has three children Claartje, Philip and Christiaan. Levelt worked experimentally for five months under Albert Michotte at the University of Leuven. In 1965 he received his doctorate with 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 has taught and researched at the University of Illinois, the University of Groningen and the Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen. In 1968 he became director of the Institute for General Psychology at the University of Groningen and in the following year he was given a full professorship in experimental psychology and psycholinguistics .

From 1971 to 1972 he remained as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , New Jersey . There he wrote his work Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics , which was first published in 1974. Then he received a professorship in experimental psychology at 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 received a professorship for psycholinguistics there and became the 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 retired. He supervised 58 dissertations.

Language production as a research focus

Language processing is about cognitive processes of speech production and speech reception. In psycholinguistics, Levelt is best known for his model of language production . Speaking is one of the particularly complex psychomotor activities of humans. For Levelt, the goal of an utterance is to realize communicative intentions. These communicative intentions are a subset of all of a speaker's intentions in a given situation. The processes of speech production run largely automatically and take place in milliseconds. There are now two alternative basic concepts for the language production process, namely, in addition to the modular-serial approach advocated by Levelt, as a counter-position, an interactive-connectionist approach. Levelt's modular model assumes that the processes of the individual processing stages must be completed before the next processes can be started. In a correspondence to computer language, Levelt differentiates between memory and process components. Two memory modules house the so-called mental lexicon. One memory module houses the vaguely described lemmas, the other the world and situation knowledge.

The process components

For his part, Levelt distinguishes between three main stages in the process of language production: firstly, conceptualization, which is responsible for pre-linguistic concept formation, secondly, the formulation, which takes care of the grammatical and phonological encoding of the lemmas, and thirdly, articulation.

Conceptualization

According to Levelt, the goal of all conceptual processes is to create a preverbal message that can then be translated into a surface structure. The preverbal message must be in a format that can then be processed later at the next stage of formulation. The content of the utterance is determined at the conceptualization stage. It is decided what is said. Listener expectations are taken into account and the type of speech act is chosen, for example a decision between a question and a prompt. In the conceptualization, Levelt differentiates between further sub-levels, namely “bookkeeping” as well as “macro planning” and “micro planning”. The micro-planning of a linguistic utterance can begin before all macro-planning processes have been completed. However, Levelt is against assuming influences from the area of ​​micro-planning on macro-planning. The sequence of the two processes is therefore predetermined and only takes place in one direction.

Bookkeeping

As "bookkeeping" Levelt describes the fact that a speaker initially represents different aspects of the discourse in a conversation situation. Information about the discourse situation is included in the planning of the statements, for example the type of discourse, whether it is an informal conversation with equal rights or more formal communicative situations. The previous course of the conversation, the previous content and the information that can be assumed to be known by the listener are also taken into account. The speaker and the listener ideally start from the same topic, i.e. the same topic of the discourse. The focus is on new and important information.

Macro planning

Macro planning is about converting the speaker's intentions, which are geared towards a communicative goal, into speech acts. Complex intentions are broken down into various partial or sub-goals that result in several speech acts. Information to be communicated is selected. In response to questions from the interlocutor, the long-term memory is searched for content. The speaker is guided by the context and what is in his focus. This information is then sequenced. It depends on the limitations of the working memory of the speaker and the listener as well as the natural order of the content. Events and processes with a natural order are sequenced according to that order. The result of the macro planning is a sequence of speech act intentions, which are then processed further in the context of micro planning.

"The result of macroplanning 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 that proceed from the original communicative intention. In other words, macroplanning produces the substance of the message, such as that the message should declare a particular proposition or interrogate a certain state of affairs. "

- Willem Levelt

Microplanning

In micro-planning, the individual speech act intentions, which have been created through macro-planning processes, are processed into preverbal messages. For example, the speakers are now checked, i.e. the objects to which the linguistic expression relates: How accessible are the speakers? Are speakers new to the discourse? Key speakers or speakers recently introduced to the discourse are more accessible. It is also determined which information is topic, i.e. belongs to the topic of the discourse. Then a message is propositionalized taking into account a certain perspective. It is referred to something (reference) and says something about it (predication). The preverbal message is now available in a format that can be further processed during the formulation.

formulation

Levelt's modular-serial model: level of formulation

During the formulation, the conceptual structure, i.e. the content of the planned utterance, is transformed into a specific linguistic structure. Appropriate entries in the mental lexicon are activated. A syntactic structure is set up and converted into a phonological representation. During the formulation, each new piece of the preverbal message is used to advance the grammatical encoding. The order in which parts of the preverbal message are created influences the syntactic structure. In the formulation, a distinction is made between grammatical and phonological coding as further sub-levels. The focus of the scientific discussion on grammatical coding is whether the lexical access takes place in one or in two stages. Experimental evidence supports the two-step theory of lexical access. Initially, only semantic and syntactic information of lexical entries is activated. In a second phase their phonological forms are activated. So Levelt assumes that the process of lexical selection is a discrete two-step process. Two different lexical representations must be accessed one after the other: the lemma and the word form.

lemma

In a first lexicalization step, a lemma is accessed in the mental lexicon. In Levelt's terminology, lemmas are non-modality-specific permanent representations of the syntactic features of a word. At Levelt, aspects of the meaning of a word were originally represented in the lemma. In the newer version of the theory, the meaning is represented in a separate network of lexical concepts that bundle the semantic attributes of a concept. At the lemma level only the syntactic features of a word are represented. The selection of a lexical entry takes place at the lemma level. The connections between the two levels of lemmas and word forms are exclusively forward and not backward. The phonological representations cannot influence the lexical selection.

Word form

The selected lemma then activates its corresponding word form. This bridges the gap between conceptual and phonological processing. At the word form level, no more than one word form is activated at a time. Only in the case of words with a high level of meaning similarity, the synonyms, can there be a parallel activation at the word form level. Access to the morpho-phonological word forms makes the phonological segments and a metric frame available. In the next step, the segments are fitted into this metric frame.

articulation

Finally, during articulation, the phonological representation is converted into motor activity. The articulation module is used to prepare and initiate speech motor skills. The result is then the actual utterance that you hear. The speaker is also his own listener. He can direct his attention to his own speaking and thus control what he is saying for form and content. According to Levelt, the high speed with which speech is produced is based on parallel processing. The different modules all work at the same time. While an utterance is being articulated, the speaker is already thinking about what to say next. Often times, pronouncing a sentence begins before the entire content is planned.

Memberships and honors

Fonts

  • A history of psycholinguistics: the pre-chomskyan era . Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.
  • Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics . [Repr. d. Ed .: The Hague: Mouton 1994 in 3 volumes]. Benjamin, Amsterdam 2008.
    1. An introduction to the theory of formal languages ​​and automata , 2008.
    2. Applications in linguistic theory , 2008.
    3. Psycholinguistic applications , 2008.
  • Lexical access in speech production . Blackwell, Cambridge MA 1993.
  • Speaking: from intention to articulation . MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1989.
  • Child language research in ESF countries: an inventory . European Science Foundation, Strasbourg 1981.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Willem Levelt: Speaking. From intention to articulation . MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1989.
  2. ^ Willem Levelt: Speaking. From intention to articulation . MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1989, p. 144
  3. ^ Willem Levelt: Speaking. From intention to articulation . MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1989, chapter 7.
  4. ^ A b W. JM Levelt, H. Schriefers, D. Vorberg, A. Meyer, Th. Pechmann, J. Havinga: The time course of lexical access in speech production. A study in priming . In: Psychological Review , 98, 1991, pp. 122-142.
  5. ^ A b W. JM Levelt, A. Roelofs, AS Meyer: A theory of lexical access in speech production . In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 22, 1999, pp. 1-75.
  6. ↑ Orden Pour le mérite elects a new member ( Memento of the original from September 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, Press Release No. 277, July 30, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bundesregierung.de
personal data
SURNAME Levelt, Willem
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Levelt, Willem Johannes Maria; Levelt, Pim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch psycholinguist
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam