A bit about Silke Brandt
I studied journalism and German and English language and literature at the University of Leipzig. In my third semester I started to work as a student assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. In 2002 I got a DAAD scholarship to study linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2003 I returned to the Max Planck Institute to do research for my MA thesis on the acquisition of relative clauses in German and for my PhD projects on the acquisition of complex syntax in German and English. In 2008 I received my PhD from the University of Basel and continued to do research on children’s acquisition of complex syntax and Theory of Mind at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. From 2011 - 2012 I taught at the English Department at the University of Basel. In 2012 I moved to Lancaster for a lectureship in Linguistics. In my research and teaching I focus on psycholinguistics and first language acquisition.
My Role in LuCiD
I lead a project entitled Putting lexical cues into discourse context. In this work package, we will use corpus analysis and eye-tracking to understand how children learn to favour contextual over lexical information in their interpretation of simple and complex sentences, a development critical to children’s ability to understand extended discourse and text.
In phase 1, I led a project looking at the links between children’s acquisition of modals (it MUST be in the red box) and mental verbs (I KNOW it’s in the red box) as well as their understanding of Theory of Mind. I was also be involved in projects looking at interactions between word order and information structure in children’s acquisition of German, English, and other languages and in projects investigating children’s processing of restrictive relative clauses.
LuCiD publications (43) by Silke Brandt
Brandt, S., Hargreaves, S., & Theakston, A. (2023). Putting Complement Clauses into Context: Testing the Effects of Story Context, False-Belief Understanding, and Syntactic form on Children's and Adults’ Comprehension and Production of Complement Clauses Cognitive Science
Bell, K., Brandt, S., Lieven, E., & Theakston, A. (2023). The acquisition of English modal constructions: A corpus-based analysis Journal of Child Language, 1-38.
Kandemirci, B., Theakston, A., Boeg Thomsen, T, & Brandt, S. (2023). Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children Child Development, 1-16.
De Ruiter, L., Lieven, E. V. M., Brandt, S., & Theakston, A. (2020). Cognition 198, 104130.
De Ruiter, L., Lemen, H., Lieven, E. V. M., Brandt, S., & Theakston, A. (2021). Journal of Child Language, 48, 1150–1184.
Boeg Thomsen, D., Theakston, A., Kandemirci, B., & Brandt, S. (2021). Developmental Psychology, 57(8), 1210-1227
Brandt, S. (2020). Social cognitive and later language acquisition. In Current Perspectives in Child Language Acquisition. How children use their environment to learn. John Benjamins pp. 155-170.
MacDonald R, Brandt S, Theakston A, Lieven E, Serratrice L. (2020). Cognitive Science, 44
Bell, K., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. & Theakston, A. (2019). Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Sheffield, UK.
Theakston, A., Bell, K., Lemen, H., Brandt, S., & Lieven, E. (2019). Paper presented at the Societas Linguistica Europaea 52nd Annual Meeting, Leipzig, Germany.
Cheung, S.,Parise, E., Brandt, S., Westermann, G. (2018). 3rd Lancaster International Conference on Infant and Child Development, Lancaster, UK.
De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., Hilton, M., Brandt, S. (2018). Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 43) Boston, MA, USA.
De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. (2017). International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC14) Tartu, Estonia.
Macdonald, R. G., Serratrice, L., Brandt, S., Lieven, E, & Theakston, A. (2017). Paper presented at the 3rd Annual LuCiD Language and Communication Development Conference, Lancaster, UK.
Brandt, S. (2017). Paper presented at the Bristol Centre for Linguistics, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.
De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., & Lieven, E. (2016). Presentation at Complexity workshop (AG4) at the 38th DGfS meeting, Konstanz, Germany.
Brandt, S. (2018). Presented at Language in Mind and Brain, Munich.
Brandt, S. (2018). Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds, UK.
MacDonald, R. G, Serratrice, L., Brandt, S., Lieven, E., & Theakston, A. (2017). Paper presented at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLap), Lancaster, UK.
MacDonald, R. G., Serratrice, L., Brandt, S., Theakston, A., & Lieven, E. (2017). Paper presented at the European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM), Wuppertal, Germany.
Brandt, S. (2017). Paper presented at Entwicklung von Qualität und Interaktion im pädagogischen Alltag (EQUIP) , Fachhochschule Potsdam.
Hardie, A., & Brandt, S. (2018). In J. Culpeper, P. Kerswill, R. Wodak, A. McEnery, & F. Katamba (Eds.), English Language: Description, Variation and Context. (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Brandt, S. (2017). In B. Hopkins, E. Geangu, & S. Linkenauger (Eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development. (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brandt, S., Honglan, L., & Chan, A. (2017). Paper presented at the Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, Budapest, Hungary.
MacDonald, R., Brandt, S., Theakston, A., Lieven, E. & Serratrice, L. (2018). Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK
Brandt, S., Hargreaves, S. & Theakston, A. (2018). Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK
de Ruiter, L., Lieven, E., Brandt, S., Hargreaves, S., & Theakston, A. (2018). Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK
Brandt, S., Hargreaves, S. & Theakston, A. (2018). Poster presented at the X. Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science (DuCog 2018)
de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., & Brandt, S. (2017). 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). 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). 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). 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). 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). Paper presented at the 2nd LuCiD Language and Communicative Development conference, Manchester.
de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S. & Lieven, E. (2016). In T. Tenbrink (Ed.) Proceedings of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, p.29.
de Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S. & Lieven, E. (2016). 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., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. (2017). Cognition, 143, 61-76.
Brandt, S., Honglan, L., & Chan, A. (2017). Paper presented at the Budapest CEU Conference .on Cognitive Development, Budapest, Hungary.
Brandt, S., Nitschke, S. and Kidd, E. (2017). Language Learning And Development. DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2016.1235500
Koymen, B., Lieven, E., Brandt, S. (2015). Syntactic and semantic coordination in finite complement-clause constructions: a diary-based case study Journal of Child Language 43, 1, 22-42
Brandt, S., Buttelmann, D., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Children’s understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Brandt, S., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2015). German children’s Use of Word Order and Case Marking to Interpret Simple and Complex Sentences: Testing Differences Between Constructions and Lexical Items, Language Learning and Development DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2015.1052448
Theakston, & Koymen, B. (2015). Getting ready for school. Talk given 8 November, Manchester Museum.