Van de Vijver

About me

[ʀybɛn fɑn də vɛivɘɹ]

I am a professor of phonetics and phonology at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany.

My research focuses on the questions: How are the sounds of words and their meaning stored in our memory (the technical term for this storage is the mental lexicon)? How do we comprehend and produce words? How do we learn to comprehend and produce words? My research connects phonetics, phonology, morphology and semantics and also learning theory (specifically error-driven learning). Recently I have focused on Maltese, a Semitic language spoken in Malta, and Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language spoken in Rwanda to find answers to these questions. I use experiments and computational modeling to find answers to my research questions.

Research areas

- Phonology

- Morphology

- Semantics

- Learning theory

- Computational modeling