Danny Dirker

Danny Dirker, PhD, is a researcher at Heidelberg University. His work investigates language processing in the context of embodiment, focusing on how visual, motor, and other sensorimotor modalities interact with spoken language production and comprehension. He earned his PhD in psycholinguistics at Heidelberg University under the supervision of Christiane von Stutterheim (primary) and Johannes Gerwien (secondary), where he examined eye movements to a blank screen and how they relate to mental imagery during event comprehension from verbal and non‑linguistic auditory stimuli. Currently, he employs wearable (head‑mounted) eye‑tracking devices to examine gaze behavior during social interaction and conversational turn‑taking, in collaboration with Anja Stukenbrock. He has also contributed automated pipelines for processing mobile eye‑tracking data collected in naturalistic contexts and uses multimodal approaches together with Anja Stukenbrock and Wolfgang Tschacher that integrate gaze, bodily movement, and conversational interaction to better understand human communicative behavior and social cognition. In addition, he collaborates on research on Turkish–German bilingualism with Laura Dieck and Christiane von Stutterheim, employing the visual-world paradigm to investigate how code‑switching modulates online processing of language.