Current projects

The BeeMEHR BMBF-project aims to establish multilingualism as an opportunity in the educational context. It considers factors such as socioeconomic status, individual beliefs, and linguistic input to make scientific findings more accessible and break down prejudices. Through seminars and coaching, it raises awareness among teachers, educators, and parents about a well-founded understanding of multilingualism, critically questioning the association of “migration background” with “poor reading performance.” Additionally, a digital learning platform supports children’s language development, regardless of their background. The project collaborates with local partners and runs for three years as part of the “Integration through Education” program.

This research project is concerned with investigating various aspects of language processing in multilinguals. In this project, all linguistic modalities are examined, i.e. speaking, listening, reading, and writing. In principle, it is assumed that multilingualism has a positive effect on various linguistic and cognitive areas and that, with sufficient input, people can become bilingual or multilingual later in life. The project investigates multilingualism across the lifespan, from infancy to older ages.

Whether a language is acquired or learned depends primarily on the quality and quantity of the input. This applies to all acquisition settings, i.e. monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual language environments. In this project, a comprehensive and in-depth measuring instrument is being developed that can objectively record the quantity and quality of input and thus determine the degree of balance or language dominance, particularly concerning bilinguals/multilinguals. The data already collected with this instrument clearly show that bilingualism encompasses different degrees of mastery and therefore cannot be seen as a discrete category.

This project focuses on the relationship between the development of executive functions and metalinguistic abilities with regard to literacy acquisition. Larger samples of preschool and primary school children will be examined, using behavioral methods in combination with experimental procedures such as eye-tracking. The project aims to provide a solid empirical basis for the central role of input in first language acquisition as well as further insights into the positive impact of multilingualism on literacy acquisition.

Linguistic relativity is an empirically validated theory that states human perception and conceptualization are language-specific. This project deals with the obligatory category of grammatical gender in German, which is not expressed as a grammatical category in other languages. In an interlingual comparison, German is compared with Farsi, a language in which the genus is not encoded grammatically. Behavioral and experimental eye-tracking data will be collected from German and Persian speakers and bilingual German-Persian speakers.

This project compares three languages (German, Russian, and Czech) regarding the underlying reference frames used in these languages for expressing time. These frames of reference are language-specific and are reflected in the forms of the so-called relative frame of reference (for example: "It is five past half past one"). The relative frame of reference is compared with the absolute frame of reference (for example: "It's two thirty-five"). The project also investigates the acquisition and teaching of time telling in children.

The interdisciplinary research project with respect to space, language and cognition aims to investigate the perception of specific architectural spaces. This pioneer project is part of the TU Dortmund, and is a collaboration between the Department of Psycholinguistics (German empirical and experimental linguistics) and Architecture (Chair of Civil Engineering). The eye-tracking method is used to investigate visual attention and cognitive mechanisms that serve as the basis for spatial perception.