Heike Behrens

Prof. Dr. Heike Behrens is a Professor of Cognitive Linguistics and Language Acquisition Research at the University of Basel, Switzerland, with joint affiliations in the German and English departments. Her research focuses on first language acquisition from a constructivist perspective, emphasizing corpus-based analysis of syntactic and morphological category development. She has held positions at institutions including the University of Groningen, the Max-Planck-Institutes in Nijmegen and Leipzig, and a visiting scholar appointment at UC Berkeley. Behrens' work bridges empirical linguistics and cognitive science, investigating developmental processes in child language production.

Education: She completed her Staatsexamen and MA in English and German at the University of Kiel, followed by a PhD at the University of Amsterdam. Her career includes research roles at the University of Braunschweig and extended stays at leading linguistics institutes.

Research Interests: Behrens specializes in corpus-driven studies of language acquisition, with particular attention to the interplay between input frequency, perceptual salience, and developmental trajectories. Her FRIAS research project examines re-representation processes in German inflectional systems, analyzing how children reconstruct linguistic structures through usage-based learning.

Her publications span theoretical frameworks in language acquisition, methodological advancements in corpus analysis, and cross-linguistic comparisons of morphosyntactic development. She has contributed to foundational texts like Corpora in Language Acquisition Research and pioneered studies on German passive constructions and plural overgeneralization errors.