Dr. Markus Steinbach for giving me the opportunity to conduct this research even if I had no clue about sign language linguistics and did not know any sign language in the beginning. This already shows that both are always open to strike new paths without knowing where this path leads to, which is essential when you enter new research areas. I could not imagine a better combination of supervisors: with Markus being an expert of sign language linguistics and with Nivi as an expert of

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... psycholinguistic research, I had the best support for developing myself as a professional researcher and a private person. I am enormously grateful that I had them by my side all the time. In addition, I am exceedingly grateful to be part of two research groups, which always allowed me to look at my research from various angles. On the one hand, there are the current and former members of the SignTeam at the University of Goettingen. A special thank you goes to Annika Herrmann for always finding time to discuss my questions and motivating me to keep going. For fruitful discussions on various topics, I want to thank the rest of the