The central theme of my research work is the impact of the social world and social interactions on infant language processing and acquisition. In my experiments, I use electrophysiological methods (EEG) to study how language processing is influenced if a social partner misunderstands language. At the same time, these studies also serve to investigate theor of mind in infancy (our ability to attribute thoughts or feelings to others, independent of our own), and to answer the question of from what age and exactly what thoughts can attribute to social partners - and whether this capacity extends to attributing language comprehension.

One of the main threads of my research is the investigation of the comprehension and neural processing of metaphorical expressions using neuroscientific tools (EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking). Metaphorical expressions are rather common in everyday language, yet their comprehension is a matter of intense debate because their meaning does not follow from a linear analysis and grammatical combination of linguistic elements: they carry some kind of extra meaning. In my research, I seek to gain a deeper understanding of the language system and its neural implementation by studying the unusual workings of figurative expressions.