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鈥檚 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 (, ) and she recently wrote a blog about . She is an advocate of Open Science: open data and analysis scripts, open materials, and pre-registration, and is therefore a member of the . Besides her research activities, Merel teaches in a range of bachelor鈥檚 and master鈥檚 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 the 2024 round, Merel received a prestigious Veni grant (NWO) for her research on the relationship between parent-child interaction, screen time, and language development in children with and without DLD.
Background
Merel van Witteloostuijn studied at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视, 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 木瓜福利影视 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 木瓜福利影视; first as a postdoctoral researcher and currently as an assistant professor.
