Research Focus

The development of language and literacy: my research focuses on how children and adults develop their language and literacy abilities over time, how they process language in real-time, and how language relates to other cognitive systems. The overarching aim is to understand how language develops as a cognitive system and the way it is processed across the lifespan.

Methodologies: to address this aim, we use off-line and on-line methodologies, including reaction time experiments, eye-tracking, and ERP experiments and compare comprehension with production. The LingLab at the University of Konstanz has excellent facilities of reaction time experiments, eye-tracking, and ERP experiments.

Linguistic phenomena: the research focuses on morpho-syntax (for example, the acquisition of tense and agreement,  definite articles, gender, pronouns and reflexives, passives, wh-questions, and relative clauses) and its interface with discourse/pragmatics and prosody.

Populations: we conduct research with a range of groups in Konstanz, the UK, Greece, India, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia not only with typically developing children and adults but also with children who develop their language abilities in an atypical way, for example children with Specific Language Impairment/Developmental Language Disorder and children with Autism. An important part of this research agenda are cross-linguistic comparisons across groups as well as cross-linguistic comparisons within multilingual speakers. George Pontikas, Dora Papastefanou, and Poly Pata work on multilingual children and adults in the UK. Dora Papastefanou is collecting data from children with Greek as a heritage and English as a majority language in the UK and is comparing them with monolingual children in the UK and in Greece. The MultiLila team is collecting language and literacy data on Hindi, Telugu and English in India. Mada Alhassan is working with Arabic speaking children with Autism in Saudi. Ngee Thai Yap and Rogayah Razak are working on Malay speaking adults, children, and children with SLI in Malaysia. The team in Konstanz will be working on children with Italian, Arabic or other languages as heritage languages and German as a majority language as well as on German as a second language in adults. Data from these populations enables us to investigate a range of languages with different linguistic properties as well as orthographies.

Keywords: language, literacy, bilingualism, multilingualism, comprehension, production, off-line, on-line experiments, typical, atypical development, Specific Language Impairment, Developmental Language Disorder, Autism.