About the BSL

The BSL is the first 'Baby Lab' in southern Germany. As in many other 'Baby Labs' throughout the world, here we are studying language acquisition in early childhood. Using play-oriented methods, we investigate how infants perceive language and what they already know about language before starting to talk. Additionally, we want to see how children learn to talk and how their language production develops throughout the first years of life.

The location of Konstanz, directly on the border to Switzerland, presents an ideal opportunity to study language acquisition not only with German children but also in comparison with children acquiring Swiss German, a distinctly different variety of German. Although standard German and Swiss German are closely related, they present clear differences, for example in sentence intonation and in phonetic contrasts.

For our research, we are continually looking for volunteers in Konstanz, Kreuzlingen and their surroundings. If you have an infant or child between 3 and 36 months of age and would like to visit the Konstanz Baby Lab, we would be most pleased if you would give us a ring or send an e-mail.