Anamaria Bentea

Anamaria Bentea is a Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz's Department of Linguistics and Zukunftskolleg. Her work focuses on language acquisition and processing in monolingual and bilingual speakers, particularly in Romance languages like Romanian and French. She investigates how grammatical knowledge is represented and used in native and non-native languages, with a special emphasis on heritage language development in multilingual contexts.

She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Geneva (2016) and has held visiting research positions at the University of Maryland (2013-2014). Prior to Konstanz, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading's Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Lab, exploring Romanian-English bilingual children’s acquisition of complex syntax.

Her research employs behavioral and eye-tracking methods to study real-time language processing, with key projects including the Marie Curie-funded ProHeritageSpeakers initiative (2021-2023) examining Romanian heritage language use in Germany. Her work addresses topics like bilingualism effects on theory of mind, syntactic processing in child heritage speakers, and the role of working memory in language comprehension.

Major awards include the Marie Curie Fellowship. Her contributions span over 30 publications on relative clause acquisition, wh-dependencies, and cross-linguistic syntax development. She has led projects combining experimental linguistics with educational implications for multilingual populations.