Claudia Friedrich

Claudia Friedrich is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Tübingen, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Department of Psychology, where she has held her position since April 2013. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes underlying language development in children, with particular emphasis on speech processing, word recognition, and the acquisition of linguistic structures.

Her educational background includes a doctorate in Psychology from the University of Leipzig (2003) and undergraduate studies in Psychology at the Technical University of Berlin (1993-1999).

Professor Friedrich's research examines how children process speech sounds, word stress patterns, and develop the ability to understand language in context. Her work investigates cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in language acquisition across different age groups, with special attention to how first and second language learners process linguistic information. Through eye-tracking, ERP, and behavioral experiments, her research explores how children develop the ability to take perspectives during communication, process prosodic features of speech, and build lexical representations. She has made significant contributions to understanding how literacy acquisition shapes speech processing and how cross-modal influences affect language development.

Her recent publications reveal a consistent focus on developmental trajectories in language processing, with increasing attention to cross-linguistic comparisons and multimodal aspects of language acquisition. The research demonstrates sophisticated methodological approaches combining behavioral, eye-tracking, and neurophysiological measures to investigate language processing from infancy through childhood.

Professor Friedrich leads several major research projects including Project A6 "The Development of Common Ground in First and Second Language Acquisition" (2025-2029), a DFG-funded project on "Stress processing at the word level in children with different language backgrounds" (2024-2027), and previously led Project B1 on modal and amodal cognition (2020-2023). Her research has been consistently supported by prestigious funding bodies including the European Research Council (ERC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

She heads the Developmental Psychology workspace at the University of Tübingen, where her research group investigates cognitive prerequisites for perspective-taking in language comprehension and the influence of perspective taking during language processing through memory experiments and eye movement studies.