Profil
Heike Behrens is professor of "Cognitive Linguistics and Language Acquisition Research" with a joint affiliation in the German and English department at the University of Basel (Switzerland). She specializes in first language acquisition where she takes a constructivist perspective. Her corpus-based work addresses the acquisition of syntactic and morphological categories with special attention to fine-grained developmental processes.
Heike Behrens did her Staatsexamen and MA in English and German at the University of Kiel, and her PhD at the University of Amsterdam. She held research positions at the University of Braunschweig, the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, and spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Univerisity of California at Berkeley. Before coming to Basel, she was professor of German Linguistics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Research fields:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive linguistics
- Frequency effects in language
- German linguistics
- Sensory semantics
- Language acquisition
- English linguistics
- Corpus linguistics
