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Home » Leuphana University, Germany
The second pilot site in Germany, led by Principal Investigator Manuel Bohn, is based at Leuphana University and will collect data from children aged 2-5. Research activities will take place in Lüneburg, a small to mid‑sized city in northern Germany, through collaborations with local kindergartens and testing sessions at the university lab.
The planned LEVANTE research aims to pilot the downward compatibility of LEVANTE measures in Germany. In close collaboration with the Stanford design team, tasks that do not require literacy will first be pre‑piloted with 50 children across the target age range to refine and adapt them for younger participants. In a second step, the fully adapted measurement set will be administered twice, approximately one year apart, to a longitudinal sample of 90 children.
For around half of the sample, children’s everyday experiences will also be recorded using a vest‑mounted camera system developed in the lab, capturing audio and video from naturalistic settings. Automated, machine‑learning–based tools will be used to extract features of social interaction, language input, and object play, enabling analyses of how everyday experiences predict developmental change on the LEVANTE measures.
Read more about the LEVANTE Pilot Sites.
Manuel Bohn is a tenure-track assistant professor of Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Psychology in Education at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He investigates the psychological roots of human communication, focusing on how children’s experiences shape their cognitive development across cultures, as well as studying great apes’ communicative abilities. His aim is to uncover what aspects of human cognition enable language learning in children. For LEVANTE, he is collaborating with the Comparative Cultural Psychology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.