Elly Koutamanis

Elly is a PhD student in the Cognitive and Developmental Aspects of Multilingualism research group at the Centre for Language Studies (Radboud University). Her research is part of the 2in1 project, a research project looking into cross-linguistic influence in children who grow up bilingually. Elly was raised in the Netherlands by Greek parents, and she has often experienced how her Dutch and Greek word choices and sentence structures influence each other. In her research she focuses on the word level. Using production and comprehension tasks, she studies how and how fast Greek-Dutch and German-Dutch bilingual children process words from their two languages. For example, she looks at words that are very similar and also mean the same thing (appel - Apfel) or mean something different (doos - Dose). She also takes into account the differences between bilinguals, such as how much they use and are exposed to both of their languages.

In her free time, Elly likes dancing (modern or freestyle in the kitchen), reading, yoga and meditation, taking walks, doing arts and crafts, and making plans to finally learn how to cook properly.