Academic background

I received a Magister Degree from the University of Mannheim, Germany, in 2003. My Magister thesis, supervised by Prof. Rosemarie Tracy, was an empirical study comparing native (American) and non-native (German) speakers’ argumentative discourse in English. In 2000/2001, I had the opportunity to study abroad at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and gain my first teaching experience at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.

In 2010 I received both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from The Ohio State University, USA. My Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “The Effect of Pitch Accents and Boundary Tones on the Interpretation of L+H* Accents”, was supervised by Prof. Shari Speer. During my time at The Ohio State University, I mostly worked on sentence processing and the production and comprehension of prosody in adults. I also taught numerous undergraduate classes.

After completing my Ph.D., I spent four years working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre 673 “Alignment in Communication” at Bielefeld University in Germany. During this time, I worked with the principle investigators Prof. Prisca Stenneken, Prof. Philipp Cimiano, and PD Dr. Katharina Rohlfing. Most of this work focused on syntactic and lexical alignment phenomena in both children and adults.

In 2014, I started a position as Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at Bangor University in Wales. During this time, I worked on research on syntactic priming in children and adults as well as prosodic processing. I am currently collaborating with colleagues in Wales on project that research and promote access to information and access to services for members of the Welsh Deaf community. 

In 2018, I started as Assistant Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria. In 2021, I completed my habilitation in Linguistics with a special focus on the English language, with a thesis titled “Barriers and enablers in language and communication: insights from alignment, processing and acquisition”. The same year I was promoted to my current position as Associate Professor.