I’m excited to share that I will be transitioning to a new academic position at Heidelberg University in July 2025. After truly enriching years at Paderborn University in Katharina Rohlfing’s SprachSpielLabor, where I’ve had the pleasure of working with wonderful colleagues and students, it’s time for a new chapter.

At Heidelberg, I will be joining Adriana Hanulíková’s Lab at the Institute for German as a Foreign Language Philology (IDF) to continue and expand my research on language development, multimodal interaction, and child-centered technologies. I look forward to deepening interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of linguistics, cognition, and human-technology interaction, and contributing to a vibrant research environment.

I’m incredibly grateful for the support and inspiration I’ve received from the academic community at Paderborn — and I’m equally excited about the opportunities and ideas that await in Heidelberg.

Together with my co-editors Matthijs Smakman (HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht), Denise Geiskkovitch (McMaster University), Mike Ligthart (VU Amsterdam), and Sofia Serholt (University of Gothenburg), I’m excited to share that we have initiated and are guest editing a new Special Issue in Frontiers in Robotics and AI entitled: Personalized Robotics: Capturing Variability in Child–Robot Interactions in Education, Healthcare, and Daily Life.

This Research Topic brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on how social robots can be personalized to support children across different contexts, including educational settings, therapeutic interventions, and everyday routines. A key focus lies on understanding individual differences — such as cognitive, emotional, or behavioral characteristics — and exploring how robotic systems can adapt to them in meaningful ways.

Together with my co-editors, we aim to create a platform that fosters research on:

• Methodologies for capturing variability in child–robot interactions
• Strategies for adaptive and personalized robot behavior
• Multimodal approaches to longitudinal interaction design
• Ethical and societal considerations in personalized child-robot interaction

The call is open for contributions in the form of original research, reviews, and methodological or theoretical advances. If you are working on related topics or know someone who might be, please feel free to share the link or get in touch.

In April, I had the opportunity to present our lab’s work on social robots at the second conference “Social Robots in the Public Sector” at the HSPV (see below). The event, organized as part of the BMBF-funded RuhrBots project, brought together experts from academia, administration, and practice to discuss the role of social robots in public institutions.

The talk explored how social robots can foster digital participation in early childhood education by supporting language development, enhancing metalinguistic abilities, and promoting critical engagement with digital technologies.

• Monograph on Word Learning with Social Robots. This book (in German) is published Open Access in the series Literacy in Elementary and Primary Education (LiEP) by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. While the central focus of this monograph is on the role of varying contextual conditions on preschool children’s long-term word learning, the presented investigation also employed social robots as an innovative methodological tool to compare learning outcomes when children engage with human versus artificial (robotic) interaction partners. The findings offer new insights into how the pragmatic contextual conditions shape word learning and how technology can support early language acquisition.

• Book Chapter on Shyness and Communicative Behavior. Co-authored with Franziska Viertel, this chapter will appear in the edited volume Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education and Care. The chapter provides a comprehensive review of current research on how shyness influences children’s communicative behavior in testing and socially evaluative contexts. It also examines the unique challenges and opportunities presented by interactions with both human and artificial partners, including social robots.

These publications further reflect my commitment to bridging developmental research, education, and child-centered technological innovation, providing a contribution to both research and practice in early childhood education.

In October and November, I had the privilege of returning to Waseda University in Tokyo for an extended research stay as part of the CULSHY project, led by Katharina Rohlfing and Kazuki Sekine. This collaboration focuses on advancing cross-cultural studies of children’s multimodal communicative behavior, including in interactions with social robots.

During this stay, we concentrated on data collection for the study to deepen insights into how cultural contexts shape children’s interactional patterns. This work is a vital step in understanding and comparing nonverbal communication across diverse cultural settings.

I’m excited to share two new publications resulting from collaborative research with colleagues:

How Turn-Timing Can Inform about Familiarity with Tasks: A Study of Shy and Less Shy Four-Year-Olds
Valeriia V. Tykhonenko, Nils F. Tolksdorf, and Katharina J. Rohlfing examine how shyness affects preschoolers’ turn-taking with a social robot. Shy children showed longer response times, especially with new tasks. The full study is available in the Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: Read more here

Language Learning with Media and Technology in (Early) Childhood
Katharina J. Rohlfing, Eugenia Wildt, and Nils F. Tolksdorf review the potential of digital tools for young children to learn language, emphasizing the importance of interactive engagement. Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.32798/dlk.1376

These studies offer new insights into early learning and technology’s role in language development.

Our paper “Preschoolers’ Interactions with Social Robots: Investigating the Potential for Eliciting Metatalk and Critical Technological Thinking” was accepted as a late-breaking report at the 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI).

As part of the cross-cultural project CULSHY (Cross-cultural studies on shyness: Experimental studies on gesture production of school-aged children and their nonverbal communicative behavior in a child-robot interaction) I am on a research stay at Waseda University in Tokyo from September to October.

In the project, led by Katharina Rohlfing and Kazuki Sekine, we are investigating the communicative behavior of preschool children towards social robots cross-culturally. During my research stay, we were able to test the study design and conduct first pilots.

I am pleased to announce that I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis “This is autumn red! Learning morphologically complex words with social robots: The influence of a systematic variation of the pragmatic frame on long-term word learning in 4-5 year old children”.

It has been a great journey of almost 5 years and I would like to express my deepest thankfulness to all the people involved in this special experience, especially my Ph.D. supervisor Prof. Dr. Katharina Rohlfing and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Fischer.