Laura de Ruiter

Researcher (Alumni)

Organisation:

University of Manchester

A bit about Laura de Ruiter

Originally from Berlin, I initially studied General and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Potsdam (Germany), before receiving an MSc in Developmental Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. I completed my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) in 2010, looking at how children use intonation to signal information structure. I then moved to Bielefeld (Germany), where I worked first as a post-doctoral researcher and later became a lecturer (for first and second language acquisition). In May 2015 I joined LuCiD as a Research Associate.

My Role in LuCiD

investigated the role of information structure in children’s developing sentence representations, with a focus on complex sentences, using both naturalistic data and experimental methods.

 

LuCiD publications (20) by Laura de Ruiter

De Ruiter, L., Lieven, E. V. M., Brandt, S., & Theakston, A. (2020). Interactions between givenness and clause order in children's processing of complex sentences Cognition 198, 104130.

De Ruiter, L., Lemen, H., Lieven, E. V. M., Brandt, S., & Theakston, A. (2021). Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora Journal of Child Language, 48, 1150–1184.

De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., Hilton, M., Brandt, S. (2018). Is before easier than after in German too? Testing the relative influence of iconicity, ambiguity, and language-specific frequencies on the processing of adverbial sentences in German. Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 43) Boston, MA, USA.

De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. (2017). The role of input frequency and semantics in English - speaking 3-5 year olds' comprehension of clause order in complex sentences. International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC14) Tartu, Estonia.

de Ruiter, L. (2016). “You’ve always got to wash your hands before you eat food” – complex sentences in English child-directed speech. Presentation at Edinburgh Linguistics Circle, Edinburgh, UK.

De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., & Lieven, E. (2016). Temporal, causal and conditional sentences in English child-directed speech. (1) Presentation at Complexity workshop (AG4) at the 38th DGfS meeting, Konstanz, Germany.

De Ruiter, J., De Ruiter, L. (2017). Don't shoot the giant whose shoulders we are standing on. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 40.

De Ruiter, L., Narasimhan, B., Chen, J., Lack, J. (2018). Children's use of prosody and word order to indicate information status in English noun phrase conjuncts. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 40(3), 1-9.

De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A. (2017). First language acquisition. (1) In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Ed. B. Dancygier) Cambridge University Press, 59-72.

de Ruiter, L., Lieven, E., Brandt, S., Hargreaves, S., & Theakston, A. (2018). Improving 5-year-olds' comprehension of adverbial sentences: a classroom based training study. Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK

de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., & Brandt, S. (2017). “You say ‘before’, I say ‘bevor”’ Testing the relative influence of iconicity, ambiguity, and language-specific frequencies on the processing of complex sentences in English and German. Paper presented at the Many Paths to Language workshop, October 6-8, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

de Ruiter, L., Lieven, E., Brandt S. & Theakston, A. (2017). The role of information structure in children’s comprehension of complex sentences –testing two hypotheses. Paper presented at The 23rd Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing Conference (AMLaP), September 7-9, Lancaster, UK

de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S. & Lieven, E. (2017). The relationship between parental input and children’s spontaneous use of adverbial clauses containing after, before, because, and if. Paper presented at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), July 17-21, Lyon, France.

De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S. & Lieven, E. (2017). Effects of clause order and connective type on children’s and adults’ processing of complex sentences. Poster presented at the 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY 2017) March 30–April 1, Cambridge, MA, USA

de Ruiter, L., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. & Theakston, A. (2017). The role of information structure in children’s comprehension of complex sentences – testing two hypotheses. Paper presented at the 3rd LuCiD Language and Communicative Development Conference, July 7th, Lancaster, UK

de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S. & Lieven, E. (2016). “You’ve always got to wash your hands before you eat food” - The role of the input in children’s acquisition of adverbial clauses in complex sentences. Paper presented at the 2nd LuCiD Language and Communicative Development conference, Manchester.

de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S. & Lieven, E. (2016). Additional complexity in complex sentences in child-directed speech. In T. Tenbrink (Ed.) Proceedings of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, p.29.

de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S. & Lieven, E. (2016). Temporal, causal and conditional sentences in English child-directed speech. Paper presented at “Sentence complexity at the boundary of grammatical theory and processing: A special challenge for language acquisition” Workshop (AG4) at the 38th Annual Conference of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS), Konstanz

de Ruiter, L. & Vihman, V. (2017). Beyond frequency: cognitive factors in children’s acquisition of morphosyntax. Paper presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Tartu, Estonia, July 2017

de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. (2017). Iconicity affects children’s comprehension of complex sentences: the role of semantics, clause order, input and individual differences. Cognition, 143, 61-76.

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