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 become an acquisitionist and went to McGill University in Montreal (Canada), where I received a Ph.D. in linguistics in 2007. At the moment, I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Montreal, working on an interdisciplinary research project entitled At the crossroads of second language acquisition and language disorders: Similarities and differences between L2 learners and children with SLI – implications for linguistic theory, clinical practice and educational policy, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
