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'Haute cuisine' inaugural lecture of James McQueen

On January 1, 2009, James McQueen (1965, Scotland) was appointed Professor in 'Learning and Plasticity' at the Radboud University Nijmegen. On October 1, he gave a witty inaugural lecture in the Radboud University Aula, which made an indelible impression on everyone witnessing this 'culinary' speech processing event.
'Haute cuisine' inaugural lecture of James McQueen

Oct 1, 2009

James McQueen studied experimental psychology at the University of Oxford. He has been interested in language ever since, particularly in speech comprehension. In 1992, McQueen got his PhD at the University of Cambridge and since 1993 he has been a researcher at the MPI for Psycholinguistics.

Unraveling speech

In his inaugural lecture, entitled 'Al sprekende leert men' and creatively presented as a five course 'haute cuisine' menu, McQueen described listening experiments that examine how listeners segment spoken words out of the continuous speech stream and how they recognise speech sounds. He examined the psychological mechanisms involved in the different mental processes underlying speech comprehension. His primary argument is that the listener needs to be able to learn. There is great variability in the way speech is realised. In order to cope with this, we have to be able to tune in to the way in which different speakers talk.McQueen demonstrated that we have this amazing capacity to learn about speech. He outlined in the lecture how he plans to pursue this research. McQueen: 'We've already learnt a great deal about this human skill, but there is still much left for us to discover.'

Last checked 2009-12-08 by Myrna Tinbergen
Max Planck Institute
About MPI

 

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.

The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, and have particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Donders Institute, the CLS and the MPI.

 

Max Planck Institute
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