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

As of October 1 2017 I am the principal investigator of an NWO VIDI project (2017-2022) entitled  The Speaker in Speech - the interdependence of linguistics and indexical information. Project goals are to further our understanding of how speakers show variation within their own speech and how they differ from others, as conditioned by linguistic structure, speech channel and language, and to thus advance the state of the art in forensic speech science.  

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.

Selected publications

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. & Lorenzi C. (2014), Prosody perception in normal and whispered French, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 135(4): 2026-2040.

Heeren e.a.(2012). Development of the A§E test battery for speech pitch perception assessment in cochlear implant users. Cochlear Implants International, 13 (4), pp. 206-219.

Heeren, W.F.L. & Schouten, M.E.H. (2010). Perceptual development of the Finnish /t-tː/ distinction in Dutch 12-year-old children: a training study. Journal of Phonetics, 38 (4), pp. 594-603.

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.

de Jong, F.M.G. and Oard, D.W. and Heeren, W.F.L. and Ordelman, R.J.F. (2008) Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), 1 (1). 3:1-3:27. ISSN 1556-4673

Heeren, W. (2006). Perceptual Development of Phoneme Contrasts in Adults and Children. Doctoral dissertation. Utrecht University.

Publications