Katharina Menn
The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2024 Dissertation Award recipient: Katharina Menn
The Dissertation Award is generously sponsored by Brain and Language.
How Early Electrophysiology Shapes First Language Acquisition: A Naturalistic Approach
Saturday, October 26, 2024, 4:00 - 4:30 pm, Great Hall 1 and 2
Chair: Sophie Scott, University College London
Speaker: Katharina Menn, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
About Katharina Menn
Katharina Menn is a postdoctoral researcher in the Max Planck Research Group "Language Cycles" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. She completed her PhD in Psychology at this institute in March 2024, under the guidance of Dr. Lars Meyer, Dr. Claudia Männel, and Prof. Dr. Dr. Angela D. Friederici. Before her PhD, Katharina earned a Master's degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she completed her thesis in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Katharina Menn's dissertation provides a novel framework for language acquisition: It suggests that the ontogenetic trajectory of electrophysiological brain maturation determines the staged pace of language acquisition. The work combines theoretical and empirical approaches to demonstrate that the gradual acceleration of electrophysiological activity predisposes the progression of first language acquisition to proceed from large to small linguistic units. The studies included have been published in Science Advances, Perspectives on Psychological Science, NeuroImage, and Neurobiology of Language. The thesis project was supported by a fellowship from the International Max Planck Research School and it received the Outstanding Dissertation Award by the International Society for Infant Studies.