Merel van Witteloostuijn is a researcher and teacher at the Development & education of Youth in Diverse Societies department. In her research, she focusses on language and literacy development, with a special interest in neurodiversity (communication disorders) and children’s environment (language environment in the home and at school, multilingualism). She is involved in several research projects that collectively aim to contribute to better support for children with and without communication disorders.

Merel regularly presents about her work at conferences for professionals and parents (TOS Congres 2024, TaalStaal 2024) and she recently wrote a blog about parent-child interactions in toddlers. She is an advocate of Open Science: open data and analysis scripts, open materials, and pre-registration, and is therefore a member of the Open Science Community Utrecht. Besides her research activities, Merel teaches in a range of bachelor’s and master’s courses and supervises theses and internships.

As a post-doc researcher, Merel is involved in the project Children and Language Mixing (CALM; NWO Vici project awarded to prof. dr. Elma Blom). Within the project, she is co-promotor of two PhD candidates. Many multilinguals combine or mix languages when they speak. The research team aims to find out whether children have difficulties learning language from mixed language input, how and why children mix, and whether language mixing is different for children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).

In 2024, Merel received a Starting grant (“startersbeurs”) in collaboration with Sietske van Viersen. Some children with DLD experience difficulties acquiring literacy skills, besides their problems with oral language. Other children with DLD do not have these literacy problems. With the grant, Merel wants to investigate what factors contribute to successful literacy development among children with DLD.

Background

Merel van Witteloostuijn studied at Utrecht University, where she completed her bachelor and research master in Linguistics (cum laude) in 2013. In 2020, Merel defended her thesis entitled "Examining the contribution of statistical learning to grammar and literacy acquisition: A study of Dutch children with and without dyslexia" at the University of Amsterdam (part of an NWO Vidi project awarded to prof. dr. Judith Rispens). After her doctoral research, Merel worked as a data-analyst at the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Since 2022, she is employed by Utrecht University; first as a postdoctoral researcher and currently as an assistant professor.