Free University of Berlin

Flavia Adani, Christine Schipke, Maja Stegenwallner-Schütz (PhD candidate)

Flavia Adani is a Professor at the Department of Education and Psychology at the Free University of Berlin, which is widely recognized as one of the leading institutes for neuroscience in Germany. Adani leads the research group “Language Development” but she also has strong connections with the Linguistic Department at the University of Potsdam (her former affiliation) and with the Psychology Institute at the Humboldt University in Berlin, offering a platform and collaborations across disciplines (linguistics, psychology, social sciences, cognitive sciences and education). Her research was so far supported by two projects granted by the German Science Foundation (DFG) (Project C3 within the SFB 632 on Information Structure – 450K€, co-PI: Prof. Dr. Barbara Höhle and an individual project of which Adani was the Principal Investigator (AD 408/1-1) – 273K€). Adani and colleagues have published on international peer-reviewed journals such as J. of Child Language, First Language, Lingua, Frontiers in Psychology, Developmental Science, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, NeuroImage and she is Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics and editorial board member of Journal of Child Language.

Among the phenomena investigated by Adani and her team are: the production and on-line processing of non-local dependencies, topicalization, use and processing of referring expressions and personal pronouns, article choice, lexical development via Fast Mapping, the development of mathematical skills. In order to address theoretical- as well as clinically-oriented questions regarding these domains, Adani and her team analyze explicit language skills combined to implicit ones (eye-movements, ERPs). Adani’s team focuses on the language profile of children and adults with high-functioning ASD also in comparison with children with Developmental Language Disorders, via standardized and experimental measures of morphosyntax, nonverbal reasoning, executive functions, and pragmatics.