Gerlind Große

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

 

 

Research interests:

I am interested in the cognitive and motivational bases of human communication and children’s language acquisition from a functional and social cognitive perspective.

Early Communication

• Cognitive and motivational prerequisites for communication in children
• Cooperative communication, esp. cooperative imperatives and requests
• Inferential processes and their bases in language comprehension
• Development of pragmatic abilities

Origins of Shared Intentionality

• Development of intersubjectivity: transition from primary to secondary intersubjectivity
• Characteristics of early interaction modes, e.g. teasing, playing, humour
• Emotional-motivational components to social-cognitive development

 

Ongoing projects:

Studies:

• Comprehension, affective impact and reciprocation of teasing behaviour in infants (with Livia Colle, Tanya Behne, and Michael Tomasello)
• Production of hidden authorship in 3- and 5-year-olds (with Thom Scott-Philipps, Michael Tomasello)
• Interspecies comparison of request comprehension (with David Buttelmann and Juliane Kaminski)
• Special pointing diary study (with Malinda Carpenter et al.)
• Informativeness inferences in 2 – 3-year-old children (with Napoleon Katsos and Ira Noveck)

Theoretical work:

• Intentions involved in ostensive-inferential communication
• Cooperative reasoning for ostensive-inferential communication (with Conny Schulze and Suse Grassmann)
• Development of a pragmatics inventory for infants and toddlers