Since January 2011, Silke Brandt holds a position as assistant to Prof. Dr. Heike Behrens in English linguistics. She studied journalism and linguistics at the University of Leipzig and UC Santa Barbara. She did research for her Masters, PhD, and postdoctoral projects on first language acquisition at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. In 2008 she got her PhD in English linguistics from the University of Basel. Silke Brandt does corpus analyses and experimental studies to investigate how children's comprehension and productive use of linguistic structures is influenced by the form and function of these structures in their linguistic environment. She sees language acquisition as a general learning process and has recently looked at interactions between linguistic and social-cognitive development.