prof. dr. J.M. McQueen (James)

James McQueen is Professor of Speech and Learning. He studied Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is a Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour and was Director of the Donders Centre for Cognition (DCC) 2020-2025. He is also a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.

His research focusses on speech learning and speech recognition: How do listeners learn the sounds and words of their native and nonnative languages and how do they recognize the consonants, vowels, prosodic structures and, ultimately, the words of spoken language? His research on speech learning explores perceptual adaptation (especially to new talkers), the acquisition of new sounds (in a nonnative language), and how new words are learned and remembered. His research on speech recognition addresses the core computational problems that listeners face, such as the variability problem (caused by the enormous acoustic variance in speech) and the lexical segmentation problem (caused by the lack of the acoustic equivalent of spaces between words). He takes a multi-disciplinary perspective on psycholinguistics, one that combines insights from cognitive psychology, phonetics, linguistics, and neuroscience.

• Language and Communication

• Speech and Learning