Anika van der Klis

Dr. Anika van der Klis is a Researcher in the Department of Psychology at Utrecht University's Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, specializing in Developmental Psychology. She is affiliated with the Kemner Helmholtz Institute ILS, focusing on language acquisition, processing, and disorders within the Experimental Psychology research program.

Her educational background includes a BA in English Language and Culture (2014-2017) and an MA in Linguistics (Research) (2017-2019) from Leiden University, followed by a PhD from Utrecht University (2019-2023).

Dr. van der Klis's research centers on language development in infants and young children, with particular focus on caregiver-child interactions, multimodal communication, and the social aspects of language acquisition. Her work integrates developmental psychology with computational approaches to speech analysis. She examines how verbal and nonverbal communication between caregivers and infants influences vocabulary outcomes, and investigates the neural correlates of speech processing in infants.

Her publication record shows consistent output in high-impact journals, with recent work focusing on multimodal aspects of caregiver-infant interactions, vocabulary development trajectories, and computational methods for analyzing infant-directed speech. Her research demonstrates interdisciplinary connections between psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.

Dr. van der Klis is actively involved in teaching courses including Computational Linguistics, Experimental Psychology, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Language Development in a Social Perspective, and Child Development: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

She currently leads research on the BRAVECHILD project examining infants' cortical tracking of speech and the development of the social brain network, and collaborates with the Municipality of Utrecht on research investigating the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on children's language and socio-emotional development.