Merel van Witteloostuijn is an assistant professor at the Development & education of Youth in Diverse Societies department. In her research, she focusses on language and literacy development, with special attention to communication disorders (including developmental language disorder [DLD] and dyslexia) and the role of the environment. She investigates how factors such as parent-child interactions, multilingualism, and screen use are related to children’s language development. The aim of her research is to contribute to improved support for children with and without communication disorders.
Research projects
In the 2024 round, Merel was awarded a NWO Veni grant for her research on the role of parent-child interactions and screen use in the language development of children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). In addition, she is co-supervisor of two PhD candidates within the NWO Vici project Children and Language Mixing (CALM) led by Prof. Dr. Elma Blom. This project investigates how multilingual children navigate language mixing and what role language mixing plays in the language development of children with and without DLD. Merel also collaborates with the department of Methodology and Statistics on a methodological project investigating the use of AI for the automatic detection and transcription of multilingual parent-child interactions in daylong audio recordings.
Outreach and education
Merel regularly presents her work at conferences for professionals and parents (TOS Congres 2024, TaalStaal 2024) and wrote a blog about parent-child interactions in toddlers. She is an active advocate of Open Science and is a member of the Open Science Community Utrecht. Besides her research activities, Merel teaches in various bachelor’s and master’s courses and supervises student theses and internships.
Background
Merel van Witteloostuijn studied at Utrecht University, where she completed her bachelor and research master in Linguistics (cum laude) in 2013. In 2020, she obtained her PhD at the University of Amsterdam"Examining the contribution of statistical learning to grammar and literacy acquisition: A study of Dutch children with and without dyslexia", as part of the NWO Vidi project led by Prof. Dr. Judith Rispens. After completing her PhD, she worked as a data analyst at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Since 2021, she has been working at Utrecht University, where she is currently an Assistant Professor.
