The Free-Floater group in Language Acquisition is interested in investigating these and other questions in infant language acquisition in the newly-formed babylab 'WortSchatzInsel' at the Georg-Elias-Müller Institut für Psychologie.

Infants display a precocious ability to learn their native language, often to the despair of struggling adult second language learners! Our interests lie in examining the mechanisms underlying this prodigious language acquisition ability, with specific reference to the sounds and meanings of the words infants learn in their first two years of life.

We are especially interested in examining how infants learn words and how much attention they pay to the sounds of the words they learn. For instance, are infants able to tell the difference between the word dog that they are familiar with and a mispronunciation of this word, e.g., rog?

We also want to learn more about the difficulties that infants face during early lexical acquisition to see if certain mechanisms are in play that make word learning easier for infants. So does knowing a word like cat make it easier for baby to learn a similar-sounding word like hat?

Our group is constantly evolving, so if you have an interest in working with us for a short project (Diplom or Masters) or a longer-term PhD thesis or post-doc, do get in touch with us!