Internships for Masters & Bachelors students

Our research

Language is the most complex communication system known to man, yet children master it before they learn to tie their shoelaces. But how do they do this exactly? You will help answer this question by working with us on our research projects. 

Potential topics are wide-ranging and depend on the projects currently running at the department. We use a range of methods including corpus analysis, computational modelling, behavioural experiments (e.g. eyetracking, standardised tests), and neurological experiments (e.g. EEG), though interns will usually only be expected to work with one of our methodologies. No prior research experience is needed as you will be given training. You will have the opportunity to learn more about research by attending lab meetings, junior scientist reading meetings and colloquia.

We host all types of internships for students interested in studying child language development; from short placements of a few hours/weeks (sometimes called lab rotations) to 6-month or year-long (thesis) projects. Interns are supervised by the department’s director or one of the department’s senior investigators, and are usually co-supervised by one of our PhD and/or postdoctoral researchers.

About you

You should be enrolled as a student on a relevant Bachelor’s or Master’s programme for the entirety of the internship period (e.g. Psychology, Linguistics, Education, Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science or a related discipline).

You will have an enthusiasm for research and good fluency in spoken and written English. For some projects, knowledge of Dutch or German is required. 

You are willing to travel to Nijmegen for the internship (unfortunately, we cannot contribute to travel or living expenses). 

How to apply

Please send your CV and motivation letter to Nienke Rulkens-Dijkstra (Research Coordinator) at Nienke.Rulkens [at] mpi.nl (Nienke[dot]Rulkens[at]mpi[dot]nl), including a summary of your background and interests, a transcript of grades from your Bachelors and Masters, as well as the type and period of your internship. 

Examples of previous projects

How much language do Dutch babies know? Although babies and young toddlers know a lot about talking, we researchers can’t ask them questions about what they know. This is why we ask their parents. Parents know more about their children’s language than any test in the lab could ever reveal. In this project, you will help us digitise data from Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) that have been filled in by Dutch parents of children between 8 and 30 months of age. CDIs are parent report instruments where parents tick off words their children understand and say, the gestures their children use and the sentences their children can say. We will then use this information to draw up a picture of children’s early language development across the country. This will have a big impact on our knowledge of development as well as enabling professionals to pick up on problems more easily in the future by comparing a child’s progress against national averages.

How do children learn the grammar of their language? This project uses computational modelling techniques to investigate how children learn syntactic categories (such as noun, verb or adjective) from the linguistic input of their caretakers. Relevant questions for this project include: what is the information from the input that learners could exploit to learn syntactic categories, when are these categories formed, and how do they interact with learning further words (and further categories). For instance, it is known that most of the initial productions of children are nouns, but it is hard to establish when or how do children go beyond the lexical representations and abstract the noun category, and whether this in turn aids learning subsequent words (possibly leading to the observed "vocabulary spurt" between 18 and 24 months, Reznick & Goldfield, 1992). The available data for this project consists of transcriptions of child-directed parental speech and video recordings of naturalistic play between children and caretakers. The possibilities include (but are not restricted to) probabilistic models, neural networks or other unsupervised learning methods.

Does variation help or hinder word learning? Children from an early age on recognize that the word bear does not begin with a d or p (i.e. they are sensitive to mispronunciations that might change meaning, even if the resulting word does not exist). At the same time, if they see a bear and a dog, and hear fare they realize that the mispronunciation is more likely to refer to the bear than the dog. But we do not yet know how infants' language experience plays into this ability to both detect illegal changes in sounds and still recover from the mispronunciation. Experience with variable pronunciations might help establish boundaries between sounds and clarify when a change is still acceptable and when it becomes too large. Alternatively, infants with more experience with variable pronunciations might even be too liberal in their acceptance of pronunciation variants. Reversely, infants who have not experienced much variation in their input might not recover from mispronunciations at all. In this project, infants' ability to detect and recover from mispronunciations is tested using eye tracking and their daily experience is surveyed using questionnaires or a mobile phone application.