Willem J. M. Levelt
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
|
Primary Section: 52, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences Secondary Section: 28, Systems Neuroscience Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2000)
|
Research Interests
I am experimental psychologist whose research has been in two areas, the first being in visual and auditory psychophysics. In the visual domain, I have worked on binocular rivalry and on binocular brightness and color summation. In the auditory domain my research has addressed issues of binaural loudness summation and the perception of musical consonance. My second and current research area is in psycholinguistics, with emphasis on the process of speaking, the way speakers map intentions onto articulations. I have been developing a general theoretical framework for dissecting this process into its component operations, some of which are the topic of detailed experimental and computational analyses. Among the analyses are the operations of linearization (the mapping of multi-dimensional information, such as spatial visual information, onto a "linear" spoken text), of self-monitoring (which can lead to spontaneous self-repair), and the core operation of lexical access (the selection and phonological encoding of an appropriate target word). In all cases it has been possible to measure the time course of an operation, either through reaction time experiments or by neuroimaging.
