Wietske Vonk passed away

She resigned in 2004, almost a quarter century later. In 2001 Radboud University appointed her to a Personal Chair in Psycholinguistics, in recognition of her senior scholarly standing. In that role, she was an important trait-d’union between our Institute and the Faculty of Arts. Our Institute provided her and her PhD students with office space and research facilities.  

Wietske started her scientific career at Groningen University, where she taught the undergraduate statistics classes in psychology and where I met her in 1972, becoming the new chair of experimental psychology. Together with her husband Leo Noordman, she spent a year at Berkeley, working with Dan Slobin and with Herb and Eve Clark at Stanford. There she laid the foundation for her cum laude dissertation, Retrieval from Semantic Memory, which Springer published as a monograph in 1979. 

Vonk’s research in our Institute nicely complemented the then dominant focus on lexical processing in speech comprehension and production. Wietske’s focus was on sentence and discourse processing in both speech comprehension and reading. How are subject and object relative clauses processed, especially causal ones, and what is the effect of animateness of protagonists? What is the mechanism of pronoun resolution in sentence comprehension? How do temporal adverbials and prosody function as segmentation markers? These issues and many more were addressed with the fabulous experimental skill which was Wietske’s trademark. 

The quality of education was another deep concern for Wietske. This applied not only to her own crystal-clear teaching, but also to the organization of courses in the interdisciplinary field of language, cognition, and neuroscience. She took, for instance, the initiative to create an interdisciplinary research master in cognitive neuroscience, an important development at Radboud University.

Wietske’s matter-of-fact approach to whatever she did, her thorough, dedicated supervision of students, combined with warmth, humor and empathy, made her a beloved colleague and a role model for her staff and students. 

Our heartfelt condolences go out to her husband Leo and their children. 

Pim Levelt