Before infants speak their first word they already produce a variety of sounds. Looking at infants in their natural habitat, i.e. in nursery or home environments, I would like to examine how infants use their prelinguistic vocalizations. My research aims to investigate which social situations and events reliably elicit vocalizations in prelinguisitc infants and whether these calls are acoustically different and context specific. Furthermore, I am interested in how prelinguistic infants combine vocalizations and gestures such as pointing in their communicative attempts and to what extent these different modalities aid recipients to understand the infant's communicative intent.

My research is supervised by Juan-Carlos Gómez and Klaus Zuberbühler.