Jana Hasenäcker

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Applied Linguistics/Psycholinguistics group at the University of Erfurt.

I am interested in the cognitive mechanisms and representations underlying language processing. My focus is on the use of functional units (graphemes, bigrams, syllables, morphemes),  statistical regularities, and prosodic features in  word recognition throughout reading development. I am also interested in interindividual differences and specifics of reading in digital contexts.

I mostly use behavioral experiments measuring reaction times (lexical decision, masked priming, letter search) and eye movements. Recently, I also started exploring EEG methods, as well as graph theory / network science.

I obtained a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Linguistics from Humboldt-University Berlin, and a PhD in Psychology from the Free University Berlin while working in the REaD group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development on morphological and orthographic processing in reading acquisition. After that, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Language, Learning, and Reading Lab at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, where I investigated (developing) readers sensitivity to distributional information of morpheme position as well as regularities in form-meaning mappings.

I am also a founding member of the German Early-Career Word Nerd Network (GeWoNN).

You can contact me via email at jana.hasenaecker(at)uni-erfurt.de.