Elna Haffner is a doctoral researcher in the Research Area 2 Language Development and Multilingualism. As part of the BMBF-funded cooperation project SPEAK, she is working on the standardization, validation and digitalization of the 'TEBIK 4-8' instrument for language assessment for multilingual children aged four to eight. At the Berlin site, she is jointly responsible for the area of "storytelling".

Her research concentrates on language production, language processing and language comprehension at sentence and text level, taking into account various influencing factors. Her focus is on the majority language German in multilingual preschool children.