Jule Hafermann, MSc

PhD student

About me

I am a PhD student in the BabyBRAIN group and the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. Before starting my PhD in October 2024, I did a research masters in Cognitive Neuroscience, specializing in language and communication. My research therefore lies at the intersection of learning, attention, language, and the brain.

During my PhD, I investigate the mechanisms underlying infants language development. I am fascinated by how quickly infants learn to understand their first language and aim to better understand how they do this. In my first project, I look at predictive processing as a potential learning mechanism. I ask whether infants and children are sensitive to how predictable speech is and whether this is modulated by factors like age and language skills. To answer my research questions, I combine computational modeling with neuroimaging and behavioral data.

Moreover, I am interested in how the way caregivers talk to their infants, also called infant-directed speech, shapes infants’ attention and language learning.