I am interested in how first language development proceeds in children acquiring German and Russian by investigating a corpus consisting of recorded child-parent interactions as well as by using Eyetracking.
In my PhD project supervised by Evan Kidd and Caroline Rowland, I aim to understand how properties of the language children hear and produce influence development of sentence comprehension in children. The focus of the project is on how children learn to assign thematic roles like “agent “and “patient” to the referents in a sentence like “A dog chased a cat” in order to correctly understand “who chased whom?”
Currently I am working on a corpus study, which investigates grammatic properties of child’s and child directed speech in German.