PhD studentships at Max Planck Child Study Centre, Manchester

[Elena Lieven]

Dear Colleagues,
Please circulate this and inform any interested students.
Best wishes
Elena Lieven

The Max Planck Child Study Centre (MPCSS) invites applications for up to 
two 3-year PhD studentships commencing in October 2009. The studentships 
will provide a maintenance stipend equating to approximately 16,000 
Euros per annum plus generous support for travel and equipment. UK/EU 
fees will also be covered.

The MPCSS, based in the School of Psychological Sciences, is part of the 
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Research 
is concerned with children's early language acquisition, carried out 
through both experimental studies and analysis of naturalistic data.

These studentships are not tied into pre-defined projects, however the 
topic of the PhD must be within the field of first language development 
using naturalistic and/or experimental data. Our focus is on children 
learning either English or German although we have ongoing studies of 
Polish, French, Russian and Finnish. We are increasingly conducting 
comparative studies in different languages. We are also interested in 
how children learn to use pragmatically appropriate language (for 
example, using appropriate referring expressions) and in the relation 
between social cognition and language development.

Below is a brief summary of some of the ongoing research in the Centre.

*Naturalistic Studies*
Ongoing research involves tracking the sources of children’s developing 
constructions, including the transitives, questions and complex 
sentences as well as conducting quantitative analyses of the children’s 
input. This is done through analyzing children’s own prior speech and 
that of their caregivers. As well as using the Manchester corpus, 
available on the CHILDES database, we are also developing denser 
corpora. These contain recordings of children taped for between 5 – 10 
hours per week. This far better sampling rate allows for in depth 
analyses, which have rarely been possible previously. We have corpora 
for four children sampled at differing rates between 2;0-3;0, three 
children between 3;0 – 4;0, with two continuing to 5;0. We also have 
access to relatively dense corpora for young children learning Polish, 
German, Finnish and Japanese.

*Experimental Studies*
Experimental studies focus on a number of aspects of language 
acquisition, such as the development of general syntactic categories 
(such as noun and verb), constructions (such as transitives and 
questions) and the development of inflectional morphology (for instance, 
case-marking in Polish). We also look at how children learn the 
pragmatics of language (for example, the comprehension and production of 
referring expressions, answering questions appropriately and registering 
given/new relations in an utterance). A number of different 
methodologies are used including priming, act-out tasks, training 
studies and preferential looking. Experiments often employ novel or 
frequency-controlled words to determine children's ability to extend 
their knowledge of language to words with which they are not familiar.

The Child Study Centre is run by Professor Elena Lieven and is funded by 
the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, directed by 
Professor Michael Tomasello, at the Max Planck Institute for 
Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

Students are supervised jointly by Professors Lieven and Tomasello 
together with Dr. Anna Theakston.

Further details can be obtained from the following web pages:

http://www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.uk/research/groups/languageandcommunication/maxplanck/

http://www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/kids/kids_research.html

http://www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.uk/staff/AnnaTheakston

Applicants should have, or expect to obtain, a minimum 2:1 degree (or 
equivalent) in psychology, linguistics or an associated discipline.

Interested students are encouraged to contact Elena Lieven by email for 
preliminary discussions on project proposals: lieven at eva.mpg.de 
<mailto:lieven at eva.mpg.de>

General enquiries can be sent to the Research Centre Secretary, Mrs 
Mickie Glover:

Max Plank Child Study Centre

School of Psychological Sciences

University of Manchester

Manchester

M13 9PL

mickie.glover at manchester.ac.uk <mailto:mickie.glover at manchester.ac.uk>; 
0161 275 2444

Although there is no closing date for applications, interested 
individuals are encouraged to apply as early as possible.

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