User Information

Full name

Simone Falk

Affiliation

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Professional background

Current position:  Post-doc assistant researcher and lecturer in Linguistics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

In the next 3 to 5 years I am working on my "Habilitation", the German qualification to become a professor. My research interests are language acquisition, phonology and syntax and the relationship between music and language in song. In 2008 I finished my PhD-thesis about "Prosodic features in infant-directed singing." This is an interdisciplinary work, where I studied how language-specific prosodic structure is shaped in songs sung to German, Russian and French learning infants in their first year of life. Between 2005 and 2007 I contributed to a broad study for the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education about early language acquisition in German. From 1998 to 2003 I studied German, French and Clinical Linguistics as well as journalism at the University of Bamberg, Germany and passed a semester at the Université Marc Block in Strasbourg, France.

My musical background: I'm a trained singer (from the age of 12 onwards) and learned to play the piano (5 years experience).

Research interest

Music, singing and language acquisition

Auditive processing of music and language sound signals

Typology of speech prosodies of the world languages

 

Research interests relevant to AIRS

All the aspects of the development group (theme 1), especially perception and production.

 

Potential contribution to AIRS

I would like to contribute to the digital library with 600 sound samples of infant-directed singing in German, French, Russian which I recorded for my PhD thesis. In the next years I am going to continue the research about the perception and production of infant-directed singing and its contribution to language acquisition in different languages as well on the general music-language interface. I hope to share and discuss the results in the AIRS network, to find partners for projects and to contribute to AIRS workshops and conferences. Additionally I'm interested in exchange programs for students working on singing with partners of the AIRS Network.

Expected benefit from the AIRS collaboration

The AIRS project is an extraordinary chance to promote singing research in all areas and disciplines. This will bring large benefits especially to students learning to research in an interdisciplinary environment, but also to practitioners of music and language education and to health institutions that may integrate new findings and techniques in teaching and treatment. Personally I wish to find partners for interdisciplinary and international projects and cooperations in the AIRS network, exchange information, ideas and material, to bring my research results to a wider audience, and to meet with researchers and practitioners interested in the boundaries of language and music.

 

History

Member for

4 years 2 weeks