Heike Behrens

Heike Behrens (born 18 January 1962 in Itzehoe, Germany) is a German linguist who is professor of cognitive linguistics and language acquisition at the University of Basel.

Education, career and honours Heike Behrens studied German and English at Kiel University, and received her doctorate in general linguistics at the University of Amsterdam in 1993. In 2018 she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.

Research Behrens' research focuses on first and second language acquisition, linguistic theory, typology and language processing.

Selected publications Behrens, Heike. 1993. Temporal reference in German child language: Form and function of early verb use. Amsterdam/Zutphen: Koninglijke Wöhrmann. Lieven, Elena, Heike Behrens, Jennifer Speares and Michael Tomasello. 2003. Early syntactic creativity: a usage-based approach. Journal of Child Language 30 (2), 333-370. Behrens, Heike. 2008. Corpora in language acquisition research: history, methods, perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Behrens, Heike. 2009. Konstruktionen im Spracherwerb (Constructions in language acquisition). Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 37, 427–444. Behrens, Heike, and Stefan Pfänder. 2016. Experience Counts: Frequency Effects in Language. Berlin: De Gruyter.