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 (46) by Silke Brandt
Zhang, S., Brandt, S., & Theakston, A. (2025). The role of iconicity in children's production of adverbial clauses Cognition. 259,106119
Boeg Thomsen, D., Kandemirci, B., Theakston, A. L & Brandt S. (2024). Do Complement Clauses With First- or Third-Person Perspective Support False-Belief Reasoning? A Training Study With English-Speaking 3-Year-Olds Developmental Psychology
Zhang, S., Junge, B., Lieven, E., Brandt, S., & Theakston, A. (2023). The Competition Between Processing and Discourse-Pragmatic Factors in Children's and Adults' Production of Adverbial When-Clauses Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
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). 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.
Boeg Thomsen, D., Theakston, A., Kandemirci, B., & Brandt, S. (2021). Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds 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). The role of animacy in children’s interpretation of relative clauses in English: Evidence from sentence-picture matching and eye movements. Cognitive Science, 44
Bell, K., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. & Theakston, A. (2019). Does caregiver input influence children’s acquisition of modality? Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Sheffield, UK.
Theakston, A., Bell, K., Lemen, H., Brandt, S., & Lieven, E. (2019). Form-meaning relations in acquisition: the case of polysemous constructions. Paper presented at the Societas Linguistica Europaea 52nd Annual Meeting, Leipzig, Germany.
Cheung, S.,Parise, E., Brandt, S., Westermann, G. (2018). Can bilingualism enhance speech perception? Evidence from a cross-cultural fNIRS brain-imaging study. 3rd Lancaster International Conference on Infant and Child Development, Lancaster, UK.
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.
Macdonald, R. G., Serratrice, L., Brandt, S., Lieven, E, & Theakston, A. (2017). The influence of animacy on children’s online processing of restrictive relative clauses. Paper presented at the 3rd Annual LuCiD Language and Communication Development Conference, Lancaster, UK.
Brandt, S. (2017). Developing understanding of different perspectives in language and false-belief tasks: evidence from German, English, and Mandarin. 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). Temporal, causal and conditional sentences in English child-directed speech. (1) Presentation at Complexity workshop (AG4) at the 38th DGfS meeting, Konstanz, Germany.
Brandt, S. (2018). Putting complex sentences into context: Interactions between children's understanding of false belief and their comprehension and production of complement clauses. Presented at Language in Mind and Brain, Munich.
Brandt, S. (2018). Theory of Mind and complex sentences. Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds, UK.
MacDonald, R. G, Serratrice, L., Brandt, S., Lieven, E., & Theakston, A. (2017). The effect of animacy on children's online processing of relative clauses. Paper presented at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLap), Lancaster, UK.
MacDonald, R. G., Serratrice, L., Brandt, S., Theakston, A., & Lieven, E. (2017). Animacy and children's online processing of restrictive relative clauses. Paper presented at the European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM), Wuppertal, Germany.
Brandt, S. (2017). Cross-linguistic differences and commonalities in children’s acquisition of mental verbs and Theory of Mind. Paper presented at Entwicklung von Qualität und Interaktion im pädagogischen Alltag (EQUIP) , Fachhochschule Potsdam.
Hardie, A., & Brandt, S. (2018). First Language Acquisition. 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). Linguistics. 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). A cross-linguistic perspective on mental verbs and false-belief development. (1) Paper presented at the Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, Budapest, Hungary.
MacDonald, R., Brandt, S., Theakston, A., Lieven, E. & Serratrice, L. (2018). Animacy and children's processing of subject and object relative clauses. Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK
Brandt, S., Hargreaves, S. & Theakston, A. (2018). How does knowledge of true and false beliefs influence choice of sentence structure? Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK
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
Brandt, S., Hargreaves, S. & Theakston, A. (2018). Putting complement clauses and false belief into context. Poster presented at the X. Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science (DuCog 2018)
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., 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.
Brandt, S., Honglan, L., & Chan, A. (2017). A cross-linguistic perspective on mental verbs and false-belief development. Paper presented at the Budapest CEU Conference .on Cognitive Development, Budapest, Hungary.
Brandt, S., Nitschke, S. and Kidd, E. (2017). Priming the Comprehension of German Object Relative Clauses. 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.