Mieke Slim

I’ve worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Language Development Department since November 2022. At the MPI, I will investigate the learning mechanisms underlying the development of quantifier representations (i.e., the abstract representations underlying words like all and each). To answer this question, we use a range of methods (such as corpus analysis and behavioural tasks), and we will study multiple language. This is interesting, because languages do not share the same set of words to express quantity relations. In English, for instance, each and every specify (slightly) different quantity relations than their Dutch counterparts elke and ieder. Does such cross-linguistic variation affect the developmental trajectory of quantifier representations? 

Before coming to the MPI, I obtained my PhD in psychology at Ghent University (2022), where I studied quantifier representations across languages in monolingual and bilingual adults using structural priming paradigms, and my MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (2018).