Cognitive Science
Research & Teachings

Curriculum Vitae

Academic Education

2006-2010
Postgraduate studies in Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Doctoral Dissertation “Do manners matter? On the acquisition of manner of articulation features”

1999-2005
Graduate studies in Linguistics and Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany.
M.A. thesis “The acquisition of German rhyme structure”, summa cum laude

Academic Positions

since 2022
Full Professor for Psycholinguistics, English Department, Mannheim University, Germany

2017-2022
Assistant Professor for Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany

2015-2016
Deputy Associate Professor for Psychology of Language, Department of Psychology, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany

2012-2015
Postdoctoral Researcher, Research Group Early Social Development, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

2010-2012
Postdoctoral Research, Research Group Language Acquisition, Department of Psychology, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany

2006-2009
Doctoral Researcher, Baby Research Centre, Department of Dutch Language and Culture, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Publications

Dissertation

• Altvater-Mackensen, N. (2010): Do manners matter? Asymmetries in the acquisition of manner of articulation features. Dissertation, Radboud Universitat Nijmegen, Netherlands

Articles in International Journals [impact factor]

• Hosemann, J., Mani, N., Herrmann, A., Steinbach, M. & Altvater-Mackensen, N. (2020). Signs activate their written word translation: an ERP study on cross-modal co-activation in German Sign Language. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 5, 57. [IF 1.318]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & T. Grossmann (2018). Modality-independent recruitment of inferior frontal cortex during speech processing in human infants. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 34, 130-138. [IF 3.963]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N., Jessen, S. & T. Grossmann (2017). Brain responses reveal that face identity discrimination is affected by statistical learning from distributional information in infants. Developmental Science, 20, e12393. [IF 3.808]
• Missana, M., Altvater-Mackensen, N. & T. Grossmann (2017). Neural correlates of infants’ sensitivity to vocal expressions of peers. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 26, 39-44. [IF 3.963]
• Schreiner, M., Altvater-Mackensen, N. & N. Mani (2016). Impact of extended exposure on infant& segmentation of words from infant- and adult-directed speech. Infancy, 21, 625-647. [IF 2.086]
• Rajhans, P., Altvater-Mackensen, N., Vaish, A. & T. Grossmann (2016). Children' s altruistic behavior in context: The role of emotional responsiveness and culture. Scientific Reports, 6, 24089. [IF 5.578]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N., Mani, N. & T. Grossmann (2016). Audiovisual speech perception in infancy: The influence of vowel identity and productive abilities on infants' sensitivity to (mis)matches between auditory and visual speech cues. Developmental Psychology, 52, 191-204. [IF 4.141]
• Jessen, S., Altvater-Mackensen, N. & T. Grossmann (2016). Pupillary responses reveal infants' discrimination of facial emotions independent of conscious perception. Cognition, 150, 163-169. [IF 3.479]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & T. Grossmann (2016). The role of left inferior frontal cortex during audiovisual speech perception in infants. Neuroimage, 133, 14-20. [IF 6.357]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & T. Grossmann (2015). Learning to match auditory and visual speech cues: Social influences on the acquisition of phonological categories. Child Development 86, 362-378. [IF 4.061]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & P. Fikkert (2015). A cross-linguistic perspective on the acquisition of Manner of Articulation contrasts in the productions of Dutch and German children. Language Acquisition 22, 2-39. [IF 1.379]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N., Van der Feest, S. & P. Fikkert (2014). Asymmetries in children' s early word recognition: The case of stops and fricatives. Language Learning & Development, 10, 149-178.
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & N. Mani (2013). Word-form familiarity bootstraps infant speech segmentation. Developmental Science, 16, 980-990. [IF 3.808]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & N. Mani (2013). The impact of mispronunciations on toddler word recognition: Evidence for cascaded activation of semantically related words from mispronunciations of familiar words. Infancy, 18, 1030-1052. [IF 2.086]
• Fikkert, P. & N. Altvater-Mackensen (2013). Insights into variation across children based on longitudinal dutch data on phonological acquisition. Studio Linguistica, 67, 148-164.
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & P. Fikkert (2010). The acquisition of the stop-fricative contrast in perception and production. Lingua 120, 1898-1909. [IF 0.647]
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & P. Fikkert (2007). On the acquisition of nasals in Dutch and German. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 24, 14-24.
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. et al. (2005). Science and technology in the region: The output of regional science and technology, its strengths and its leading institutions. Scientometrics, 63, 463-529. [IF 2.183]

Conference Proceedings

• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & N. Mani (2013). Effects of pre-exposure to object and label during word-learning. In Baiz, S., Goldman, N. & Hawkes, R. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 1, pp. 13-23. Sommerville: Cascadilla Press.
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & N. Mani (2011). Bilinguals activate words from both languages when listening to spoken sentences. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Book Chapters

• Altvater-Mackensen, N. (2020). Listen up! Developmental changes in perception in the first years of life. In Worthington, D. & Bodie, G. (Eds.), Handbook of Listening, pp.121-137. Wiley.
• Benders, T. & N. Altvater-Mackensen (2017). Before the word: acquiring a phoneme inventory. In Westermann, G. & Mani, N. (Eds.), Current Issues in Developmental Psychology: Early Word Learning, pp. 1-14. Taylor & Francis.
• Bobb, S.C., Drummond Nauck, L.Y.D., Altvater-Mackensen, N., Von Holzen, K. & N. Mani (2016). Listening with your cohort: Do bilingual toddlers co-activate cohorts from both languages when hearing words in one language alone? In Schwieter, J.W. (Ed.), Bilingual Processing and Acquisition: Cognitive Control and Consequences in the multilingual mind, pp. 47-69. John Benjamins.
• Altvater-Mackensen, N. & N. Mani (2015). Phonological features mediate object-label retrieval and word recognition in the visual world paradigm. In Mishra, R.K., Srinivasan, N. & Huettig, F. (Eds.), Attention and vision in language processing, pp. 23-28. Springer.