Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics
PO Box 310
6500 AH Nijmegen
T +31 (24) 3521911
F +31 (24) 3521213

Cognitive Psychology Unit
Department of Psychology
Leiden University
PO Box 9555
2300 RB Leiden
The Netherlands
T +31 (71) 5273630
F +31 (71) 5273783
E gerard à gerardkempen . nl

• Downloadable publications
• Complete list of publications (PDF)
• Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
• Unifcation Space parser: demonstration movies

Gerard A.M. Kempen (1943) is professor of cognitive psychology at Leiden University since 1992 (emeritus-professor since October 2008), and Research Associate of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen since 1999. From 1976 to 1992 he was professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Nijmegen, where he had received his PhD in 1970. His scientific work concerns the grammatical aspects of human sentence production and comprehension. He is studying these topics through a combination of linguistic, experimental-psychological and computational methods. His contributions include

• the concept of incrementality in language production
• the distinction between lemmas and lexemes in the Mental Lexicon for language production (with Pieter Huijbers)
• the division of labor and the interaction between conceptualization and formulation processes in sentence production
• an early computational model of human sentence production (with Eduard Hoenkamp)
• the (neuro)cognitively motivated Performance Grammar formalism (with Koenraad De Smedt and Karin Harbusch)
• a grammatical theory of clausal coordinate ellipsis based on similarities with speech error repairs
• the (neuro)cognitive model of parsing called Unification Space (with Theo Vosse)
• arguments for large-scale overlap between the grammatical processing mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension and those underlying sentence production (with Nomi Olsthoorn and Simone Sprenger).

Since 1980 he initiated and supervised various theoretical and applied research projects dealing with the computational treatment of Dutch, among other things, for visual-interactive teaching of grammatical structures (sentence analysis) in secondary education. In the course of the latter project, he (re)discovered (in 1993 or thereabout):