Subject-specific student advice for Language Dynamics: Acquisition, Variation, Change (Master's Programme)

Ever since my first introduction to linguistics, I have been fascinated by the question of how the human language system works. During my studies, I began to specialise in psycholinguistics, with a focus on language disorders and language acquisition. My main interest was and still is how people process, and understand language and how they acquire this ability. Through cooperation with colleagues from the field of hearing research, I was able to expand my interdisciplinary research, which led to two joint DFG projects investigating the interaction of hearing and sentence complexity using a combined audiological and psycholinguistic approach. As PI in the Cluster of Excellence, I am building on this research and investigating sentence comprehension and processing in younger and older adults with and without hearing impairment and in children with hearing loss. The latter is done in international collaboration with Prof Friedmann (Tel Aviv, where I had a research stay in 2019) and Prof Hendriks (Groningen) and, more recently, Prof Karawani (Haifa, from 2022-2023 as a Humboldt Fellow in my research group). In addition, I have collaborated with colleagues from Hannover (Dr. Finke, Prof. Büchner, MHH) in studies on language acquisition in children with CIs, which led to two completed PhDs and joint publications. In hearing research, I have also collaborated on an interdisciplinary basis with colleagues from neuropsychology (Prof. Thiel, Prof. Rieger), which has led to joint publications investigating the effects of hearing impairment and hearing aids on sentence processing.