Question: When did you realize that you wanted to study communication and voices?

Nadine Lavan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

Good question. I’m not sure, actually. It all started with learning English in secondary school when I was around 10, I think! First I was very excited to get a whole new way of communicating and one my parents couldn’t understand. That was thrilling, so I put effort into learning the language. A few years later, I then got interested in how the sounds of the English language don’t really map onto the sounds of my native language (German) – it’s close enough but I thought I could hear differences between the languages’ vowels. So, I read a little bit into that (and discovered phonetics!) and from then on, I was hooked. I didn’t know, however, that studying communication could be more than a hobby, so it took me a little while but I eventually found my way to studying linguistics, phonetics and psychology and got more and more interested in the topics as I went along!