Experience

 
 
 
 
 
April 2023 – Present
Göttingen, Germany

Research Associate

Experimental Sign Language Lab, Department of German Philology, University of Göttingen

Project: “Parts of speech and iconicity in German Sign Language” funded by the German Research Foundation Priority Programme on “Visual Communication”
Principal Investigators: Thomas A. Finkbeiner, Nina-Kristin Meister, & Markus Steinbach
 
 
 
 
 
April 2018 – November 2024
Leipzig, Germany

PhD Candidate

International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication: Structure, Function, & Plasticity

Thesis Advisory Committee: Angela D. Friederici, Emiliano Zaccarella, & Nikolaus Weiskopf
 
 
 
 
 
January 2018 – March 2023
Leipzig, Germany

Doctoral researcher

Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive & Brain Sciences

Supervisor: Angela D. Friederici
 
 
 
 
 
June 2017 – July 2017
Santa Barbara, USA

Fellow

Kavli Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience

Directors: George R. Mangun, Barry Giesbrecht, Michael Miller, & Mike Gazzaniga
 
 
 
 
 
March 2013 – July 2016
Graz, Austria

Student Research & Teaching Assistant

Language Development & Cognitive Science Unit, University of Graz

Supervisor: Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf

Selected Publications

. Modality-independent core brain network for language as proved by sign language. 2024.

Preprint PDF Dataset

. Functional neuroanatomy of language without speech: An ALE meta-analysis of sign language. In Human Brain Mapping, 2021.

PDF Dataset Video DOI

. Psycholinguistic norms for more than 300 lexical signs in German Sign Language (DGS). In Behavior Research Methods, 2021.

Preprint PDF Dataset Video DOI

Recent Publications

All Publications

. Deaf signers adapt their eye gaze behaviour when comprehending an unknown sign language. In D. Barner, N.R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri and C.M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1998–2005). University of California Digital Library., 2025.

Preprint PDF Source Document

. Data collection in multimodal language and communication research: A flexible decision framework. 2025.

Preprint PDF DOI

. Towards a “DGS-LEX”: A roadmap for the collaborative creation of a psycholinguistic database for German Sign Language (DGS). In Linguistische Berichte, 91–100, 2025.

Preprint PDF Video DOI

Recent & Upcoming Talks

All Talks

Background. Many of the world’s spoken and sign languages mark the difference between the two major lexical categories noun and verb …

Introduction: Language processing in the adult neurotypical brain is subserved by several white-matter pathways which connect inferior …

Introduction: The major networks implicated in language processing can also be discerned using resting-state MRI and several studies …

Introduction: Sign languages are natural languages in the visual-kinesthetic modality (Kusters et al., 2020) which use the hands, body, …

Introduction: Functional localizers in fMRI enable the precise and participant-specific identification of voxels that respond to a …

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