I am a researcher in the BabyBRAIN-groep and the Afdeling Taalontwikkeling at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. Before starting my PhD in October 2024, I did a research masters in Cognitive Neuroscience, specialising in language and communication. During my PhD, I investigate the mechanisms underlying infants’ language development. I am fascinated by how quickly infants learn to understand their first language and aim to better understand how they do this.
Expectations in language learning
In my first project, I look at whether preschool children are already predicting upcoming sounds and words based on their language knowledge. For instance, when children listen to a story and hear “The little polar bear lives at the north pole where there is lots of ice and ...”, they might expect the word snow. and would be more surprised if the word they now hear was sunshine. However, the next time they hear “ice and ...”., they might not be as surprised if the word that follows is sunshine since they learned from their past experience that this is a possibility as well. Mismatches between what a child expects and what is actually heard might therefore be important for language learning. For this project, I am using multiple methods, including computational modeling, EEG, and behavioural data.
Infant-directed speech
Moreover, I am interested in how the language input children receive influences their attention and language development. Many adults change their way of speaking when they are addressing an infant or young child compared to when they are talking to another adult. This adaptation is called infant-/child-directed speech, while adult-directed speech describes how adults usually talk to each other. It has been shown that infants and children can differentiate between the two styles of speaking and seem to pay more attention to infant-/child-directed speech. In my PhD, I want to further explore what drives the attention to speech and whether this is related to language outcomes.
