User:Ritt27/Katharina J. Rohlfing

Katharina J. Rohlfing (* 1971 in Tarnowskie Góry, Poland) is a German linguist and professor of psycholinguistics at Paderborn University, Germany.

Carreer
Katharina Rohlfing studied German linguistics, philosophy and media studies at Paderborn University (graduating in 1997). In 2000 she obtained a degree from the advanced distance learning course in "Foreign Language German Lessons in Theory and Practice" at Kassel University, Germany. In the graduate program "Task-oriented communication", she received her doctorate in linguistics at Bielefeld University, Germany in 2002 with the topic "UNDERstanding: How infants acquire the meaning of UNDER and other spatial relational terms".

After completing her doctorate, she worked on research projects at San Diego State University, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, where she was funded in the DAAD postdoc program and by the DFG. With the project "Educating attention: Symbiosis of language and action" she became a Dilthey Fellow (Volkswagen Foundation).

She was then a member of the Applied Computer Science working group (Prof. Dr. Gerhard Sagerer) at Bielefeld University. From 2008 to 2015 she led the project group "Emergentist Semantics" at CITEC and contributed as PI to EU projects (iTALK and ROBOT-DOC) in the field of "developmental robotics".

Katharina Rohlfing has been a professor of psycholinguistics at Paderborn University since 2015. She is also the scientific director of the SprachSpielLabor. The research in the SprachSpielLabor includes studies on language development, social interaction, child-robot interaction and explanation processes.

Since July 1, 2021, she has been the spokeswoman for the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center/Transregios 318 "Construcing Explainability" and is leading three sub-projects in this.

Research Focus
Katharina Rohlfing's research topics are asymmetric interaction, multimodal interaction, early childhood language acquisition and memory processes, child-robot interaction, developmental robotics, and development of explainable artificial systems.

In asymmetric interactions, she investigates cognitive and interactive requirements that arise for interaction partners to engage in co-constructive interaction. A central aspect in her research is the synchronization of speech with actions of dialog partners, which can promote learning of intelligent systems.

Theory development
Katharina Rohlfing follows the interactionist approach (Bruner, 1983; Nomiou et al., 2016; Raczaszek-Leonardi et al., 2019) and in interdisciplinary cooperation developed the theory of Pragmatic Frames from it.

Early communicative development is multimodal. In collaborative research, studies indicate s that caregivers respond to childrens nonverbal behaviors and use them in pursuit of a common goal, while the goals vary and determine different developmental pathways of communicative behavior.

Katharina Rohlfing looks at multiple nonverbal signals (gestures accompanying speech, eye contact, movements) in interaction with spoken language and identifies patterns of interaction depending on specific contexts or identified over time. Findings from this work point to multimodal support strategies of caregivers toward their children that are related to children's language development.

In language acquisition, Katharina Rohlfing is also interested in questions of how new knowledge is related to existing knowledge and how knowledge structures become established over time. She conducts extensive slow-mapping studies (involving several days of learning) that show which aspects of a new word are permanently acquired and how robust the meaning of a new word has become. Such studies have shown that even young children benefit from semantically organized input in the form of narratives. Gestures also contribute to the consolidation process.

Application
Katharina Rohlfing's studies on child development and multimodal support strategies have two areas of application: (1) early literacy (development of children's language skills and critical thinking). (2) development s of intelligent systems (child-robot interaction or explanatory systems).

Awards

 * 2021: Honorable Mention at the IDC (Interaction Design and Children) as a co-author: Tolksdorf, N. F., Viertel, F., Crawshaw, C. E., Rohlfing, K. J. (2021): Do shy children keep more distance from a social robot? Exploring shy children’s proxemics with a social robot or a human. In: Proceedings of the IDC (Interaction Design and Children), Athens, Greece, 527–531.
 * 2016: Best Paper 2013 of IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development as a co-author: Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., Nomikou, I., Rohlfing, K. J. (2013): Young children’s dialogical actions: The beginnings of purposeful intersubjectivity. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development 3: 109–112.
 * 2009: Best Paper Award at the ICDL 2009 as a co-author: Schillingmann, L., Wrede, B. & Rohlfing, K. J. (2009): A computational model of acoustic packaging. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development 1: 226–237.
 * 2006: Dilthey Fellowship, Research Initiative: Focus on Humanities, VolkswagenStiftung
 * 2004: Emmy Noether-Fellowship Phase 1 of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the project Early semantic knowledge about spatial relations
 * 2002–2003: Postdoctoral Fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for the project Early semantic knowledge about spatial relations
 * 1999–2002: Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Graduate School Task-oriented communication (GK 256) for the project How infants acquire the meaning of UNDER and other spatial relational terms

Monographs

 * Frühkindliche Semantik. Günter Narr Verlag (Narr Studienbücher), Tübingen 2013.
 * Frühe Sprachentwicklung. UTB, Tübingen 2019.

Editorships

 * Grounding Language in Action. Together with J. Tani. Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development 3, 2011.
 * Asymmetric Interaction. Together with I. Nomikou and K. Pitsch. Special Issue of the Interaction Studies, 2013.
 * Microdynamics of Interaction: Capturing and Modeling Early Social Learning. Together with K. G. Deák. Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 2013.
 * Learning from picturebooks. Perspectives from child development & literacy studies. Together with B. Kümmerling-Meibauer, J. Meibauer and K. Nachtigäller. Routledge series in Explorations in Developmental Psychology, 2015.
 * International perspectives on digital media and early literacy: The impact of digital devices on learning, language acquisition, and social interaction. Together with C. Müller-Brauers. Routledge, 2020.
 * Multidisciplinary perspectives on mechanisms of language learning. Together with M. Schilling, P. Vogt, C. & J. Yu and M. Spranger. Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 2020.