Research Interests

My research interests include first language acquisition and grammatical processing, with a focus on

• morphological and syntactic development in first language acquisition

• developmental language disorders (in particular SLI)

• the role of morphology in the mental lexicon

• word order, case or agreement marking and their relation to argument/event structure

• the acquisition of possessive constructions

• the relationship between language and cognition

• methodological aspects of language acquisition research
  (comparisons of different methods of data collection and analysis).

My current research projects focus on the acquisition of case, agreement and possessive constructions and the role of child-directed speech.

I have collected a large and unique corpus of German child language, which is archived at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen: http://www.mpi.nl/resources/data/browsable-corpora-at-mpi. Please contact me, if you are interested in collaborative projects or PhD and PostDoc projects on this corpus.

I am a member of the Psycholinguistics Research Group, the Syntax Research Group and the Language and Computation Group.

I am organising the Child Language Reading Group, where we discuss articles on child language and publications on experimental and corpus-based research methods that are used in research on child language.

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