About
Niels Schiller
City University of Hong Kong
Main areas of research
Psycholinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Speech Production
Morphological and phonological encoding
Representation of lexico-syntactic features
Multilingualism
Niels O. Schiller is a Chair Professor of Psycho- and Neurolinguistics at City University of Hong Kong and Head of Department of Linguistics and Translation. After his undergraduate studies at Trier University in Germany, Schiller was awarded a scholarship from the German Max Planck Society to carry out his PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In 1997, he received his PhD in Psychology from the Radboud University in Nijmegen. In his PhD dissertation, Schiller investigated the role of the syllable in lexical access during speech production. Following his PhD, he held research positions at Harvard University, Maastricht University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In 2004, Schiller was appointed professor of psycholinguistics at Maastricht University, and in 2006 he became professor of psycho- and neurolinguistics at Leiden University, before moving to Hong Kong in 2024. Schiller’s research interests include lexico-syntactic, morphological, and phonological encoding processes in mono- and multilingual language production.
From thought to sound in speech production
Outline
Speaking is one of the most complex human skills. Producing speech is an extremely fast process that includes lots of planning ahead. Nevertheless, it is very robust and in informal speech we only make about one speech error in thousand words. In my talk, I will describe the cognitive processes that take place during speaking, from conceptualisation, via lexical access and lexical selection, to word form encoding and articulation. I will illustrate each process by experimental work.
I will especially zoom into word selection from the mental lexicon and the representation and processing of lexico-syntactic features, such as grammatical gender in Indo-European languages but also classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. I will also present data from L2 learners of grammatical gender and classifier systems.
Furthermore, I will present data on word-form encoding, especially morphological encoding (compounding) and phonological encoding (syllables). These data have been acquired with several distinct methodologies (behavioural, electrophysiological, neuroimaging) and from distinct populations (neurotypical participants and patients).
I will conclude by arguing that the combination of different research methodologies, populations, and languages will lead a more comprehensive insights into speech processing.