We are looking for MBCS students who are interested in multilingualism in children. Specifically, we are currently investigating how multilingual children learn to switch to another language when other speakers do not understand the language of the conversation. What speaker cues do they use to understand that a speaker does not understand a certain language? Can children pick up on somebody else’s relatively subtle facial expressions to know that they should switch to another language to avoid communication breakdown?

We will investigate these and other questions in a virtual reality design: children visit a virtual market where they do some virtual grocery shopping and meet avatars that either speak only Dutch or English, or both. We are looking for students who can help setting up the experiment and help running it in a first pilot study with children aged 10 tot 12 years.

Some working proficiency in Dutch is required for this internship. If you have experience with the software Unreal Engine, this is considered an advantage, but note that this is not required, because you will get training and support from an experienced research assistant involved in the project.
Are you interested in child multilingualism and not afraid of developing programming skills in (user-friendly) 3D computer graphics software? Please contact us!