Cornelia Schulze

Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany

 

 

Research interests

For my PhD, I conduct studies on relevance inferences in young children. That is, in every-day conversation, speakers often mean other things than they actually say. Thus, listeners need to make inferences and go beyond the utterance in order to derive the actual speaker’s meaning.

There are several questions tied to this research topic:

• At which age do children make such complex inferences?
• Do children indeed need a Theory of Mind to infer the relevance of others’ linguistic behavior?
• What’s the role of ostensive communicative cues in complex indirect communication?

The overarching research question targets children’s comprehension of others’ intentions and the cognitive abilities required for pragmatically successful communication.