Rate My Professor Titia Benders

Titia Benders is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences at Macquarie University, where she co-supervises PhD projects including that of Anwar Alkhudidi. She previously served as Lecturer in Linguistics and Deputy Director of the Child Language Lab at Macquarie University. Benders holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam (2013), with the thesis "Nature’s distributional-learning experiment: Infants’ input, infants’ perception, and computational modeling." She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam, specializing in Phonetics and Language Acquisition; her Master’s thesis was conducted at the Speech Development Lab, University of Calgary. She received a 4-year Toptalent grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2008) to pursue her PhD. Her postdoctoral research was at the Center for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, and she was a visiting researcher at the MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney.

Benders’ research specializations include the development of phonological representations—segmental and prosodic—at the interface of perception, production, and input in children aged 6 months to 6 years acquiring one or multiple languages, with emphasis on lesser-studied languages. She employs methods from phonetics and developmental psychology. A further interest is the linguistic and emotional properties of infant-directed speech by parents. Key publications encompass "Investigating the Effects of Speaking Rate on Spoken Language Processing in Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing" (Abrahamse et al., 2025, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research), "Spoken language processing in noise by deaf and hard of hearing children: Effects of speaking rate" (Abrahamse et al., 2025, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America), "Acoustic Exaggeration of Vowels in Infant-Directed Speech: A Multimethod Meta-Analytic Review" (Lovčević et al., 2025, Psychological Bulletin), "Exploring the nature of multilingual input to infants in multiple caregiver families in an African city: The case of Accra (Ghana)" (Omane et al., 2025, Cognitive Development), "Experimental methods to study child language" (Benders et al., 2024, The Routledge Handbook of Experimental Linguistics), and "Computational modelling of language acquisition: An introduction" (Benders & Blom, 2023, Journal of Child Language). She has authored over 40 refereed publications.