Willem (Pim) J. M. Levelt - Biography#

Willem (Pim) J. M. Levelt is known as one of the most influential researchers of human language behaviour and speech production. Levelt was the first to describe cognitive processes that are crucial to speech production, and he has clarified the importance of the “mental lexicon”.

Levelt studied psychology in Leiden, completing a dissertation titled “On binocular rivalry” in 1965. The following year, he moved to the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. His subsequent research and teaching career included positions at the University of Illinois, the University of Groningen, and the Radboud University Nijmegen. From 1971 to 1972, Levelt was member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he completed his trilogy “Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics”. In 1976 Levelt founded the Max Planck Project Group for Psycholinguistics, which continued from 1980 as the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, with Willem Levelt and Wolfgang Klein as directors.