Lena Ackermann
She/Her
I am bi and I am a PhD student in language acquisition.//
As a child, I was curious about all things maths and science, but some of my teachers discouraged my interest in these fields. As a teenager, I switched from reading non-fiction to fiction, started working at a bookstore and eventually started a degree in German and French studies. However, I quickly realised literary studies weren’t quite my cup of tea. I was about to change my major when I took my first linguistics classes. Why had nobody told me how awesome a *science* of *language(s)* was?! I went on to get a master’s degree in linguistics and did an internship at a research centre for language acquisition. My graduate studies and internship also introduced me to statistics and computational approaches to linguistics.In 2016, I started my PhD in language acquisition, working at the intersection of psychology, linguistics and cognitive science. In my PhD, I want to find out why children learn the words they do and how we can explain variability in early vocabularies.
Twitter @masterwahnsinn