Heike Behrens
Heike Behrens is professor of Cognitive Linguistics and Language Acquisition Research at the University of Basel (Switzerland), with a joint affiliation in the English and German department. She received her PhD at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Anne Baker, after completing her MA at the University of Kiel. She held positions at the Max-Planck-Institutes for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, as well as at the Universities of Braunschweig, Cologne, and Groningen. Also, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Human Development, UC Berkeley.
Heike Behrens has been involved in the collection and dissemination of a number of corpora of German child language, most notably the collection of a dense database at the MPI in Leipzig, the retranscription and new analyses of the diaries of Clara and William Stern with Werner Deutsch at the University of Braunschweig, and the contribution of the extensive database collected by Rosemarie Rigol, all available in the CHILDES database. The work with these naturalistic data from different periods and research perspectives stirred her interest in the social and pragmatic embedding of language development.
She takes a functionalist, usage-based perspective to language development, with a special focus on the acquisition of morphosyntax in German and related languages. In particular, she in interested in how children disentangle structures where multiple functions are encoded by the same morphemes.