Flavia Adani

Prof. Dr. Flavia Adani is a Professor of Language Development at the Free University of Berlin (Department of Education and Psychology) since 2019. Previously, she held a Junior Professorship for Language Acquisition Disorders at the University of Potsdam (2010-2018) and conducted postdoctoral research at institutions in Paris. Her work bridges psycholinguistics, syntax, and developmental disorders, with a focus on typical/atypical language development, autism, and Down syndrome. She employs eyetracking to study sentence processing in children and adults.

• Education: PhD in Experimental Psychology, Linguistics, and Cognitive Neuroscience (University of Milano-Bicocca, 2008, 'Excellent'); Laurea in Kommunikationswissenschaften (University of Siena, 2003, '110/110 cum laude')

Her research explores how syntactic structures, number morphology, and cognitive constraints influence language comprehension. Recent studies examine bilingual children, relative clause processing, and diagnostic tools for developmental disorders. Her 2025 article on morphosyntactic assessment reflects ongoing innovation in language disorder diagnostics.

She serves as

• Deputy Chair of the Institutional Council at Dahlem School of Education (2021-2025)
• Erasmus Coordinator for Special Education
• Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Child Language

Her interdisciplinary work integrates linguistic theory with experimental methodology.