Rolf Harald Baayen

The University of Tartu has conferred the degree of Honorary Doctor of Linguistics on Professor Rolf Harald Baayen for his outstanding contribution to the development and teaching of quantitative linguistic methodology and long-standing collaboration with the linguists of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Tartu.

Rolf Harald Baayen was born on 2 October 1958. He studied Theology and General Linguistics at the Free University of Amsterdam and passed his Doctoraalexamen in General Linguistics (equivalent to a Master of Arts) in 1985. He completed his PhD in General Linguistics at the same university and defended his thesis, A corpus-based approach to morphological productivity. Statistical Analysis and Psycholinguistic Interpretation, in 1989. He spent one further year at the Free University of Amsterdam in a postdoctoral position.

In 1990, he became an academic staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) in Nijmegen. In 1998, he received a Pionier award for career advancement from the Dutch Research Council, allowing him to establish a research group investigating language processing at the MPI. In 1998, he also became an Associate Professor at Radboud University. In 2006, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences granted him a Muller Chair and he was made Professor of Quantitative Linguistics at Radboud University. From 2007 to 2011, he was a Professor of Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, where he led the comparative psycholinguistics lab.

In 2011, Baayen was granted the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where he leads a research group investigating the role of discriminative learning in language processing. In 2012, he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2017, he received a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for the WIDE project, which aimed to deepen our understanding of word production and comprehension in spontaneous speech. In 2022, he was granted a second ERC grant for the SUBLIMINAL project, which focuses on researching and modelling language processing on the example of Asian languages. 

Baayen has authored close to 200 publications, which have over 52,000 citations, according to Google Scholar. In 2008, he published a textbook on quantitative linguistics, Analyzing Linguistic Data, which was one of the first linguistics textbooks to introduce methods of quantitative analysis and is still widely used among linguists today. He is the editor-in-chief of the psycholinguistics journal The Mental Lexicon. 

Baayen has supervised 32 PhD theses, 25 of which have reached completion. He has played a major role in teaching statistical methods to linguists and has collaborated with linguists in various countries, hosting them in the Netherlands, Canada and Germany. He has led many workshops on quantitative methods in North American and European universities, including the University of Tartu.

Baayen has significantly contributed to the development of psycholinguistics and quantitative linguistics at the University of Tartu and Estonia, and he has significantly affected how linguistics research is conducted in Tartu. He has held lecture series here on statistical methods and language modelling. Especially the first of these, a course held in 2012, empowered many PhD students and early-career researchers to employ novel methods in linguistics. Baayen has shown a deep interest in Estonian and has used Estonian as an example in his publications and as a test language in modelling. He is an editorial board member of the Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics. He has also supervised and mentored Estonian linguists at various stages of their research careers in the fields of quantitative linguistics, morphological processing of Estonian and language modelling. Collaboration with him has helped advance – and is sure to continue to further – the theoretical and methodological competence of many Estonian linguists.