W.N. Harmsen (Wieke) MSc

Wieke Harmsen is interested in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to investigate the development of literacy skills in Dutch primary school children. She focusses on children’s oral reading (decoding) skills, spelling skills (both handwritten and typed), and their interrelation. With respect to reading, she investigates mainly how diagnostic measures describing children’s reading accuracy, fluency and expressivity can be extracted automatically from speech. For her spelling research, she developed an algorithm with which spelling errors can be automatically detected and classified based on phonological and morphological information. She used this algorithm to perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of spelling errors made by Dutch children.