Prof. Dr. Helen Engemann

Helen Engemann is Junior Professor of Multilingualism in the Department of English. Her research interests centre around the processes of multilingual language acquisition across various ages and contexts. She investigates language acquisition from both a psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistic perspective. She is especially interested in language contact phenomena, the factors behind their occurrence and the implications for language change.

 Since January, she has been vice speaker of the DFG research unit “Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition, and Change“ (SILPAC, FOR 5157, Gepris 437487447). Within this research unit, she is the principal investigator of the project „Priming in contact-setting bilinguals and monolinguals as a driver of language change”. Since 2022, she is a member of the DFG scientific network “Language Contact Phenomena in Multilingual First Language Acquisition” (LaCoLa).

Helen Engemann studied Classics, French and General Linguistics at the Universities of Oxford (BA Hons & MA), Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris and Cambridge (MPhil). She completed her PhD from the University of Cambridge (2012) on the topic of bilingual first language acquisition in English-French speaking children. From 2012 to 2017 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the CNRS Paris, the Free University of Bolzano and the Goethe University Frankfurt in the fields of psycholinguistics, language acquisition and multilingualism.

Helen Engemann teaches first and second language acquisition, multilingualism, psycholinguistics, research methods, as well as foundation topics in General Linguistics.