Biography
I read English and German Philology at the University of Göttingen in Germany, completing my studies with a PhD in generative syntax. I have worked on a variety of syntactic phenomena including infinitival complementation, anaphor resolution, non-canonical word order phenomena, island constraints, and agreement phenomena. My current research focuses on grammatical processing in mono- and multilingual adults, and on experimental syntax (see my publications and research statement).
Current externally funded research projects:
- Grammatical processing and syntactic change (DFG, with U. Demske)
- Bilingual processing ability as a predictor for language learning (DFG, with H. Clahsen)
I am an editorial board member of Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Languages, and the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. I also serve as an academic editor for PLOS One. I have taught courses mainly in the areas of theoretical syntax, the syntax/semantics interface, sentence processing, and second language acquisition. Information about my past and current doctoral students can be found here, and general information about research student supervision can be found here.
| since 2011 | Senior Researcher & Co-Director, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism |
| 2011 | Habilitation, University of Potsdam |
| 2005 - 2011 | Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), University of Essex, UK |
| 1997 - 2005 | Lecturer (Assistant Professor, tenured), University of Essex, UK |
| 1994 - 1997 | Teaching Fellow, University of Essex, UK |
| 1995 | PhD, University of Göttingen, Germany |
| 1992 | MA, University of Göttingen, Germany |