Nicole received her M.A. from Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf in linguistics, psychology, philosophy and information sciences in 2005. From 2006 to 2010 she was PhD student at the Baby Research Centre of Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her PhD thesis examines the development of phonological representation in children, focusing on the relationship between speech perception and production and on the question how much phonological detail is associated with early lexical representations.

Since April 2010 Nicole works in the Free Floater Research Group Language Acquisition and the associated infant language lab WortSchatzInsel.. Her research investigates lexical development in infants and lexical organization in mono- and bilingual adults. She focuses on the relation between speech perception and production and the question what mechanisms and organization principles are helping infants (and adults) to recognize words and to understand speech.