Hello!


I am a cognitive scientist and I work at the intersection of cognition, language and development. I am currently primarily involved in two lines of research. The first looks at how word learning interacts with young infants' ability to reason about the objects that surround them. The second line looks at how adults' and infants' pupils synchronize to temporal regularities in spoken language and what we may learn about language acquisition by tracking synchronized pupillary changes. 


I did my PhD under the supervision of Marina Nespor at SISSA (Trieste, Italy) looking at the structure that emerges in gestural communication and how prosody of spoken language facilitates language acquisition. I spent my first post-doc in Jacques Mehler's lab working on the ERC project "PASCAL" where we looked at language acquisition in young infants. I moved to Berlin with an Individual Marie Curie Fellowship. The project was carried out in University of Potsdam BabyLab under the supervision of Barbara Höhle and it looked at rhythmic synchronization to speech and music. I am currently involved in the DFG funded project "Limits of Variability".


My work has appeared in journals like VICE, The Independent, Daily Mail, as well as Italian newspapers like Sole24.ore, Il Piccolo, as well as RAI radio and RAI television. You can find a recent research profile on me here (in German) and read about the Marie Curie project in the Horizon Magazine.

Upcoming Talks

Langus,A., Schreiner, M.S., Burmester, J., Hilton, M., Höhle, B., Elsner, B., & Wartenburger, I. (9 May, 2024). Pupillary entrainment to natural speech reveals the development of bottom-up and top-down processes in speech perception. ERC "BabyRhythm" Closing Workshop. Padova, Italy. https://lilia.dpss.psy.unipd.it/babyrhythm/

Langus, A., Hullebus, M., Fritsche, T., Höhle, B., & Gafos, A. (June 19-21, 2024). Poster: Uncertainty in word learning in 2-year-old infants and adults. Workshop on Infant Language Development  (WILD 2023), Lisbon, Portugal. https://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/babylab/wild2024/

Garcia, R., Langus, A., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. (June 19-21, 2024). Talk: Infants’ sensitivity to sonority sequencing: evidence from behavior and pupillary synchronization. Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2023), Lisbon, Portugal. https://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/babylab/wild2024/

Langus, A., Höhle, B., & Gafos, A. (9-11 July, 2024). Talk: Uncertainty in word learning in 2-year-old infants and adults. International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS XXIV), Glasgow, Scotland. https://infantstudies.org/2024-congress/

Langus, A. & Boll-Avetisyan, N. (9-11 July, 2024). Symposium Talk: Musical experience is linked with infants’ pupillary entrainment to speech. International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS XXIV), Glasgow, Scotland. https://infantstudies.org/2024-congress/

Langus, A. & Marimon, M. (9-11 July, 2024). Poster: Rapid label-referent mapping with vocoded speech. International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS XXIV), Glasgow, Scotland. https://infantstudies.org/2024-congress/

Hullebus, M., Gafos, A., Fritzsche, T., Langus, A., & Höhle, B. (une 27-29, 2024). Perceptual recoverability of place in German stops. Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19), Seoul, Korea. https://labphon.org/labphon19/home

You can find me at:

University of Potsdam

Cognitive Sciences Unit 

Department of Linguistics

Haus 14 / Raum 2.39

Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25

D - 14476 Potsdam

Email: alanlangus (at) gmail.com