Jana studied Linguistics at Humboldt-University Berlin and got her PhD in Psychology from the Free University Berlin in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development. Her main research interest is visual word recognition in reading development.

Jana came to the lab thanks to funding from the DFG (German Research Council) to explore whether children's visual word identification system is sensitive to distributional information on morpheme position. She's now additionally investigating whether/how children (and adults) code for regularities in form-to-meaning mapping.