I'm a language scientist working at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the consortium "Language in Interaction" funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Before joining the MPI, I worked in the ERC-funded project "Grammatical Universals", headed by Martin Haspelmath at Leipzig University. I obtained my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Leuven in 2011 and my habilitation qualification in General and English Linguistics in Leipzig in 2019.
I enjoy using and teaching R, statistics and corpus methods because this is a way of shaping the linguistic practices of tomorrow. My big theoretical interest is communicative efficiency and how it manifests itself in language structure and use. Now at the MPI I'm busy with several experiments that involve artificial language learning and which help us to understand the universal cognitive and communicative biases of language users.
I enjoy creating animations for my artificial language learning experiments.
