I have been a linguist since my preschool days, when I pondered the difference in vowel quality in the Swiss-German word for 'chimney' as pronounced by my mother (/xæmi/), my father (/xœmi/), and my grandmother (/xemi/). Yet dialectology was not my calling, and after obtaining a lic. phil. I degree in Anglistik and Germanistik from the University of Zürich in 2000, I decided to study language acquisition and went to McGill University in Montreal (Canada), where I received a Ph.D. in linguistics in 2007. After completing a postdoctoral project at the University of Montreal, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), I took up a postdoctoral position at the Center for Infant Studies at Stanford University in 2008.
