Nicole Altvater-Mackensen studied Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf
and received her Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. After completing her graduate studies, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Psychology of Language at Georg-August-University Göttingen and with the Early Social Development research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. From 2017 to 2022, she was an Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz. Since 2022, she has held the Chair of Psycholinguistics at the University of Mannheim. In her research, she is interested in how we learn, process, and represent language. A focus of her research is early language acquisition and its neural correlates. She is particularly interested in the interplay between language and other cognitive domains, as well as the role of multimodal and social information in language learning. Her research uses a broad range of behavioral and neurocognitive measures, such as pupillometry, EEG, and fNIRS with infants, toddlers, and adults.
