Team

Eva Belke (all projects, especially Artificial Language Learning) 

Eva Belke is Professor of Psycholinguistics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In one strand of her research, she combines experimental psycholinguistic research with research on language teaching. She is particularly interested  in how implicit learning can be put to use in language teaching by means of optimizing the input. Initially, she focused on fostering the acquisition of grammar in primary school children, especially the acquisition of grammatical gender and nominal inflection. With the Litkey project, she brought together a group of researchers who look at the acquisition of grammar and orthography in an integrated fashion and wanted to do their research in this framework. 

Sarah Kuba (Artificial Language Learning)

Sarah Kuba worked a research associate and PhD student at Ruhr University. For the project ”Artificial Language Learning” she studied the effects of different modes of presentation of language input on grammar acquisition during the preschool years.

Pia Marie Braun (Artificial Language Learning)

In the artificial language learning study, Pia Marie Braun was involved in data collection at the daycare centers and in data coding. Subsequently she worked as a research assistant at the Department of Linguistics.

Claudia Müller-Brauers (Children’s Books and Songs)

Claudia Müller-Brauers is a professor at the Institute for Special Education at Leibniz Universität Hannover, where she heads the department of "Didactics of Symbol Systems German". Her work focuses, among other things, on early childhood literacy development and media research. She investigates the potential of analog and digital picture books for the development of educationally crucial language skills (grammar knowledge, narrative skills, etc.).
 

Friederike von Lehmden (Children’s Books and Songs)

Dr. Friederike Maria von Lehmden is a clinical linguist (M.Sc.). For her doctorate, she studied the role of social interaction concerning  repetitions of syntactic structures in children. By writing picture books for supporting of grammar acquisition and the associated manual for the Litkey project she conncted fundamental linguistic knowledge with possibilites for practical language promotion and implicit teaching.

Stefanie Dipper (Corpus Analysis)

Stefanie Dipper is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She focuses on the analysis of non-standard data such as historical language data or learner data. The manual and (semi-)automatic annotation of data with suitable features plays a central role in her work. In cooperation with colleagues, several widely used corpora were created, including the reference corpora Mittelhochdeutsch (Middle High German, ReM) and Frühneuhochdeutsch (Early New High German, ReF) as well as the Litkey corpus, which was annotated as part of the Litkey project.

Ronja Laarmann-Quante (Corpus Analysis)

Ronja Laarmann-Quante is a research associate in the Research Cluster D²L² „Digitalization, Diversity and Lifelong Learning. Consequences for Higher Education“ at FernUniversität in Hagen. As a computational linguist, she is interested in how language technology and artificial intelligence methods can be applied to learners' texts to gain insights into learning processes, among other things. For the Litkey project, she used a large corpus of texts from primary school children to investigate how well spelling errors can be automatically predicted and which factors influence the spelling difficulty of words.

Sonia Kandel (Writing Study)

Sonia Kandel is Professor of Psychology at the Humanities and Social Sciences department of the Université Grenoble Alpes and a researcher at in the Parole et Cognition group of the GIPSA lab. Her research is focused on experimental (hand)writing research. She is particularly interested in the acquisition of spelling and grapho-motor processes in writing, including dyslexia and dysgraphia, i. e., delayed or impaired developmental trajectories and acquired disorders.
 

Jessica Ernst (Writing Study)

Jessica Ernst studied Linguistics with a focus on psycholinguistics at RUB. From 2015 to 2019, she was responsible for the coordination of the subproject 'Writing Study' as a research associate.