Introduction

Abstract

"Siebout Govaert Nooteboom (Sieb, [sip]) was born 65 years ago (19 April, 1939) in Makassar on the isle of Celebes (now Sulawesi), in the former Dutch East Indies, which is now part of the Republik Indonesia. Nooteboom obtained obtained a BA degree (kandidaats-examen, in 1963) in Dutch Language and Literature at Leiden University, and then specialised in General Linguistics at the same university (MA degree, doctoraal-examen, in 1966). In 1972 Nooteboom defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Production and Perception of Vowel Duration in Dutch: A study of durational properties of vowels in Dutch. The dissertation was defended cum laude at Utrecht University, with Antonie Cohen as the primary supervisor; the research leading up to the dissertation was done at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) at Eindhoven. This dissertation, and the articles based on it which appeared in the international journals, presented ground-breaking work and established Nooteboom’s name as a player in the international field of the discipline"