Willemijn Heeren is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

More information about Willemijn Heeren

Fields of interest

• Forensic Phonetics and Linguistics
• Experimental Phonetics
• Psycholinguistics

Research

My research goals are to further our understanding of (i) how language users vary within their own productions and from each other, and (ii) how variation is conditioned by factors such as linguistic structure, speech channel and language.  

Curriculum Vitae

After a ‘propedeuse’ in Mathematics from Leiden University in 1998 I studied Linguistics, also at Leiden University, and got my MA degree (cum laude) by the end of 2001. In 2006 I received the PhD degree in Phonetics from the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, for a thesis called 'Perceptual Development of Phoneme Contrasts in Adults and Children'. In that year I started working as a postdoctoral researcher for the University of Twente’s Human Media Interaction group on the NWO-CATCH project 'CHoral' access to oral history. As of September 1 2008 until May 2010 I combined that position with a postdoc position in the EU FP7 Dual Pro project. From January 2011 until May 2012 I worked on a project called 'InterPitch' funded by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, at the Equipe Audition of École Normale Supérieure, Paris. From June 2010 until March 2015 I studied prosody in whispered speech funded by an NWO VENI project at Leiden University. Between March 2015 and August 2017 I was an assistant professor at Utrecht University, teaching BA and MA students in Linguistics on phonetics and statistics. Between 2017 and 2022 I was the PI in an NWO VIDI project  entitled 'The Speaker in Speech - the interdependence of linguistics and indexical information. '

Key publications

• Heeren W.F.L. (2020), The Effect of Word Class on Speaker-dependent Information in the Standard Dutch Vowel /aː/, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 148(4): 2028-2039.
• Heeren, W., Bibyk, S., Gunlogson, C., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (2015). Asking or telling –real-time processing of prosodically distinguished questions and statements. Language and Speech, 58(4): 474-501.
• Heeren, W., and Van Heuven, V. J. (2014). The interaction of lexical and phrasal prosody in whispered speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 136(6): 3272-3289.
• Heeren, W.F.L. & Schouten, M.E.H. (2008). Perceptual development of phoneme contrasts: how sensitivity changes along acoustic dimensions that contrast phoneme categories. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124 (4), 2291-2302.

Activities