Nivedita Mani

Nivi is a professor in the Department of Psychology of Language at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Her work is devoted to the factors underlying word learning and word recognition in young children. Word learning is the result of a dynamic two-way interaction between environment and learner, with a focus on learners and what they know, what they are interested in and their motivation to learn.

She is a principal investigator on numerous projects funded by the German Research Foundation (as well as by the British Academy during her time in the UK) and co-author of numerous publications, including the recently published book Early Word Learning.

In 2017, she was elected to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and won other prizes, including the Fritz Behrens Foundation Science Prize.

She received her PhD from Oxford University in 2006. After a short stay at the Centre for Child Language at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, she returned to Oxford for a postdoctoral position from 2006 to 2008, during which time she was Career Development Fellow in Psychology at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She was then awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research on the mechanisms of phonological priming in children at University College London. In January 2010, Nivi came to Göttingen to found the research group "Psychology of Language" and the associated Babylab, the WortSchatzInsel.