I am a doctoral candidate at the Department of Neuropsychology at the MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. I work on Project 1: “The sensitive period for associative learning of non-adjacent dependencies in verbal and non-verbal material“, which investigates the developmental trajectory of non-adjacent dependency learning in early childhood.

Within the part of this project based in Leipzig, we use EEG to investigate at which developmental time point the shift from associative learning to more controlled learning of non-adjacent dependencies takes place. Associative learning has previously been observed in 4-month-old German infants (Friederici, Mueller, Oberecker, 2011), while adults exhibit more controlled learning mechanisms (Mueller, Oberecker, Friederici, 2009). By also assessing cognitive and language development via eyetracking and behavioral measures, we aim to find out which cognitive abilities drive this shift. We further investigate whether this developmental trajectory is specific to language or domain-general by comparing non-adjacent dependency learning in the linguistic and the non-linguistic domain.