Forskning ved Senter for språk, hjerne og læring (C-LaBL) undersøker hvordan flere språk samhandler i hjernen. Gjennom samarbeid på tvers av lingvistiske teorier, nevrovitenskap og språktilegnelse/-prosessering, fokuserer vi på effektene av flerspråklighet – for de involverte språkene, for hjernene som inneholder dem, og for læring og undervisning av flere språk.
C-LaBL er delt inn i tre domener (språk, hjerne og læring) som er knyttet sammen av et tverrgående forskningstema som fokuserer på lingvistisk avstand (likheter/forskjeller mellom språk). Kjernevirksomheten til C-LaBL undersøker samspillet mellom flere grammatiske strukturer i den flerspråklige hjernen, med hovedfokus på betydningen av lingvistisk avstand for: (1) språkutvikling, (2) påvirkning språkene immellom, (3) nevrokognitive tilpasninger i hjernen som et resultat av flerspråklig erfaring, og (4) læring og undervisning av flere språk.
Vårt arbeid er teoretisk motivert og bruker en rekke forskningsmetoder, inkludert atferdseksperimenter, bliksporing, elektroencefalografi (EEG) og magnetisk resonansavbildning (MRI).
Senteret finansieres av Trond Mohn forskningsstiftelse og UiT Norges arktiske universitet 2024-2029. C-LaBL bygger videre på og utvider forskningen gjort ved AcqVA Aurora-senteret, som finansieres av Aurora-senterprogrammet ved UiT, 2020-2026.
For arrangementer ved senteret, ta en titt på kalenderen.
C-LaBL består av tre domener, språk, hjerne og læring, som er knyttet sammen gjennom vårt overordnede forskningstemaet, lingvistisk avstand.
Klikk på domenene nedenfor for å lese mer (engelsk).
Seniorforskere: Terje Lohndal, Natalia Mitrofanova, Marit Westergaard;
Professor II: Ludovica Serratrice
Seniorforskere: Jason Rothman, Vincent DeLuca;
Professor II: Jubin Abutalebi
Seniorforskere: Roumyana Slabakova, Anne Dahl, Øystein A. Vangsnes;
Professor II: Victoria Murphy
My research primarily focuses on how different aspects of bilingual language experience variably impact brain structure, function, and several cognitive processes. I study how these neural and cognitive adaptations dynamically shift over time and with changes to patterns of language use.
In short, I’m interested in first, second, third and multilingual acquisition, syntactic variation in adult and child language, language attrition/heritage languages, and especially how the languages of multilinguals affect one another.
My background is mainly within syntactic theory and monolingual first language acquisition. For my PhD, I investigated the structure of the Norwegian noun phrase, as well as how it is acquired. I collected a longitudinal corpus with three monolingual children between the ages of 1;9-3. In the study I accounted for the semantics, syntactic structure and the prosodic characteristics of early uses of articles and determiners. My main focus was on the phenomenon known as double definiteness. Following on from this, I worked a lot on word order variation, specifically on what determines the choice of word order when such variation is permitted, and how this is acquired. This included work on subject and object shift, double objects, and possessives, which in Norwegian may be pre- or postnominal. Many of these studies were based on elicited production data.
In recent years, I have expanded my work on the acquisition of noun phrases and word order variation to bilingual acquisition and heritage languages, in addition to continuing my work on monolingual children and adults. A lot of my work on multilinguals has focused on how structural similarity may result in crosslinguistic influence, and how it may be a factor not only in language acquisition, but also in heritage languages and language attrition. For example, I have studied subject shift and object shift in Norwegian heritage speakers in the US and L2 learners of Norwegian.
In the future, I want to continue working on multilinguals, including second and third language acquisition and heritage language more generally. So far my studies of heritage languages has been based on the elderly speakers in the Corpus of American Nordic Speakers (CANS) and on various bilingual child language corpora. Thus, so far I have worked with very young and very old heritage speakers. In the future my ambition is to study heritage speakers of varying ages. I am also planning a project on the effect of the word order similarities between English and Norwegian in different populations, including heritage speakers of different ages.
Grammatikk, syntaks, morfologi, syntaktisk variasjon, nordiske språk og dialektar, språkleg variasjon, fleirspråklegheit, bidialektisme, språktileigning, kognitiv utvikling, språkhaldningar
Jeg forsker på forskjellige aspekter ved andre- og tredjespråkstilegnelse, det vil si innlæring av språk etter tidlig barndom. Jeg er interessert i både teoretiske og anvendte sider av språktilegnelse. Jeg er spesielt interessert i hvordan språkene påvirker hverandre hos flerspråklige og i forholdet mellom eksplisitt og implisitt læring. Jeg er også opptatt av flerspråklighet i vid forstand, og av flerspråklighet og språkinnlæring i skolen.
Research interests: Comparative grammar, multilingualism, heritage languages, acquisition, language change, grammatical gender, architecture of grammar, history of linguistics, philosophy of language, theory of science, varieties of Norwegian, English
See the English version for more details.
My background is in threoretical linguistics, with a focus on the syntax-semantics interface. My research interests today are fairly broad, spanning argument strucutre alternations, language processing, dialect variation and change, the syntax-prosody interface, language attrition and language acquisition, but all my research aims at gaining a better understanding of the architecture of the human language faculty.
I'm currently involved in several projects, with local, national and international collaborators. I'll present some ongoing and recent projects/studies below, organized thematically.
Eye tracking, Language change and the processing of Grammarical Gender in Norwegian
Over the last couple of years (2015-2018), we have been using psycholinguistic metohds, mainly eye tracking, to understand the current ongoing change in the Norwegian grammatical gender system. This research involves collablorations with Irina Sekerina (CUNY), Marit Westergaard, Yulia Rodina, Rachel Klassen and Øystein Vangsnes. Here is some of the output and current research:
Grammatical gender in the mental lexicon: Insights from L1 language change (With Rachel Klassen, abstract, presented orally at the TheGEN workshop, erlin 14-15 June 2016, Berlin. This is mainly Rachel's work, building on reaction time data collected through IbexFarm. Hopefully, we will collect more data over the coming months and write it up as an article - the results are really cool!)
Gender Change in Norwegian Dialects: Comprehension is affected before Production (2016, with Yulia Rodina, Irina Sekerina and Marit Westergaard, article published in Linguistics Vanguard, special CUNY issue)
Other stuff related to Gender in the Mainland Scandinavian languages, from a more theoretical and typological angle, see the following recent abstract: Gender syncretism as a result of overspecification, not underspecification and an old slideshow: Adjectival inflection in Mainland Scandinavian: Subset vs. Superset (2010 - 2011).
The transitivity alternation project
From 2013 to 2016 I was a reseracher (50%) in the Transitivity Alternation Project. The project was managed by Gillian Ramchand, and other collaborators included Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh) , Martin Corley (Edinburgh) and Mai Tungseth (UiT). We are still running some follow-up studies, now in collaboration with Eva Wittenberg (UCL, San Diego). Find more information about the project on Gillian's project page. Some of the output with links to articles, posters and presentations are listed below.
Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English (Article in Glossa, 2016, with Tungseth, Corley, Sorace and Ramchand)
Word order variation in North Germanic synchronically and diachronically
Over the last couple of years I have been collaborating with Ida Larsson (UiO) on word order variation in Scandinavian, with a focus on particle placement, object shift and subject placement. Currently we are working within Ida's NFR-funded project Variation and Change in the Scandinavian Verb Phrase on building up a database of elicited production data, targetting variation with respect to consituent order in the Scandinavian languages. The elicitation method and the background research questions are described in the article The Nordic Word order Database: motivations, methods, material and infrastructure (accepted for publication). The database can also be browsed here: https://tekstlab.uio.no/nwd . Other related work is Ida's and my chapter on particle placement diachronally and synchronally in Swedish and Norwegian (again, only Swedish). For a more diachronic focus, see our poster from DiGS 2017: Argument Placement in Scandinavian - Stable Variation and Parametric Change. More news about the database to follow soon!
Second language acquistion
Since Aumtumn 2016, I have been involved in a couple L2 acquisition projects.
The syntax-prosody interface
The CASTL-fish research group at UiT had a strong focus on the syntax-prosody interface 2017-2018. Some of my work on the topic is listed below. My work on Scandinavian word order variation is recently also more oriented towards prosody. Some recent work below:
Norwegian heiritage speakers in America
Recently, I have been involved in two projects that build on the recordings of Norwegian heritage speakers, as collected in the CANS-corpus (Corpus of American Nordic Speech). The first one is a collaboration with Merete Anderssen and Marit Westergaard on noun phrase strucuture (possesives and definite expressions). This work centers around Merete and Marit's extensive research on the structure and acquisition of noun phrases in Norwegian. The article Crosslinguistic similarities and differences in bilingual acquisition and attrition: Possessives and double definiteness in Norwegian heritage language is now out in Binlingualism: Language and Cognitiion. The seocnd collaboration is with Terje Lohndal and Marit Westergaard on V2 in heritage Norwegian -- updates to follow soon!
Scandinavian dialect syntax
A lot of my research targets syntactic microvariation within and between the Scandinavian languages. I was a researcher in ScanDiaSyn/NorDiaCorp project 2010-2013, together with Kristine Bentzen, Piotr Garbacz, Janne Bondi Johannessen (project leader), Ida Larsson and Øystein Vangsnes (project leader). This resultet in volume 1 of Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (online), with more than 60 articles each targetting the dialect varation with respect to a specific syntactic phenomenon. My articles (17) mainly cover argument structure/verb phrase syntax (overview here) and binding/co-reference (see overview here). More about micro-variation with respect to binding can be found in my paper On inter-individual variation and mid-distance binding in Swedish (2013, Working paper in Scandinavian Syntax).
Voice, category change and argument structure
Most of my work earlier was centered around different types of passives and nominalizations. I'm still working modelling the choice of passive in Swedish (periphrastic or synthetic), and the relationship between argument structure and category (adjectival and verbal particles, "big" and "small" nominalizations). Some work that still bears some relevanc is listed below, with links to published or unpublished material.
The locus of cross-linguistic variation
A common theme of my research is linguistic variation, both within and between languages and even speakers. Several of the publications above, e.g. the causative paper and the mid-distance reflexives paper. Other relevant work, with a focus on differences between Swedish and English, are listed below.
Localizing cross-linguistic variation in Tense systems: On telicity and stativity in Swedish and English (2012, in Nordic Journal of Linguistics, fulltext here)
Contact, Animacy, and Affectedness in Germanic (2012, with Gillian Ramchand, in Comparative Germanic Syntax: the state of the art, fulltext here)
Jeg studerer hvordan barn og voksne tilegner seg og bruker flere språk. Forskningen min har fokusert på førstespråk, andrespråk og tredjespråkstilegnelse, samt tospråklighet og språklig attrisjon, for det meste ved å bruke et psykolingvistisk eksperimentelt tilnærming.
Sentrale stikkord er
Forskningsprosjekter
First, second/third, and bilingual language acquisition, syntactic variation, heritage languages, language attrition, diachronic change, comparative syntax, word order, nominal structure (grammatical gender, definiteness, possessives), English, Norwegian (especially North Norwegian dialects), Russian, German
Personal website: https://site.uit.no/maritwestergaard/
Min forskning fokuserer primært på hvordan ulike aspekter av flerspråklighet påvirker hjernen og de tilknyttede kognitive prosessene, spesielt arbeidsminne. Jeg undersøker hvordan disse kognitive tilpasningene dynamisk endres over tid og med endringer i språkmønstre, ved hjelp av psykolingvistiske eksperimenter og EEG.
Phonology, Optimality Theory, microvariation
Mine akademiske interesser inkluderer logopedi, flerspråklighet og klinisk lingvistikk. Jeg fokuserer hovedsakelig på ervervede språk-, tale- og kommunikasjonsvansker, med en spesiell interesse for utvikling av metoder for kartlegging og behandling av flerspråklige personer. Videre er jeg opptatt av hvordan arbeidet med flerspråklige personer med afasi og demens kan bidra til å informere lingvistiske modeller for flerspråklig prosessering.
My background is in threoretical linguistics, with a focus on the syntax-semantics interface. My research interests today are fairly broad, spanning argument strucutre alternations, language processing, dialect variation and change, the syntax-prosody interface, language attrition and language acquisition, but all my research aims at gaining a better understanding of the architecture of the human language faculty.
I'm currently involved in several projects, with local, national and international collaborators. I'll present some ongoing and recent projects/studies below, organized thematically.
Eye tracking, Language change and the processing of Grammarical Gender in Norwegian
Over the last couple of years (2015-2018), we have been using psycholinguistic metohds, mainly eye tracking, to understand the current ongoing change in the Norwegian grammatical gender system. This research involves collablorations with Irina Sekerina (CUNY), Marit Westergaard, Yulia Rodina, Rachel Klassen and Øystein Vangsnes. Here is some of the output and current research:
Grammatical gender in the mental lexicon: Insights from L1 language change (With Rachel Klassen, abstract, presented orally at the TheGEN workshop, erlin 14-15 June 2016, Berlin. This is mainly Rachel's work, building on reaction time data collected through IbexFarm. Hopefully, we will collect more data over the coming months and write it up as an article - the results are really cool!)
Gender Change in Norwegian Dialects: Comprehension is affected before Production (2016, with Yulia Rodina, Irina Sekerina and Marit Westergaard, article published in Linguistics Vanguard, special CUNY issue)
Other stuff related to Gender in the Mainland Scandinavian languages, from a more theoretical and typological angle, see the following recent abstract: Gender syncretism as a result of overspecification, not underspecification and an old slideshow: Adjectival inflection in Mainland Scandinavian: Subset vs. Superset (2010 - 2011).
The transitivity alternation project
From 2013 to 2016 I was a reseracher (50%) in the Transitivity Alternation Project. The project was managed by Gillian Ramchand, and other collaborators included Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh) , Martin Corley (Edinburgh) and Mai Tungseth (UiT). We are still running some follow-up studies, now in collaboration with Eva Wittenberg (UCL, San Diego). Find more information about the project on Gillian's project page. Some of the output with links to articles, posters and presentations are listed below.
Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English (Article in Glossa, 2016, with Tungseth, Corley, Sorace and Ramchand)
Word order variation in North Germanic synchronically and diachronically
Over the last couple of years I have been collaborating with Ida Larsson (UiO) on word order variation in Scandinavian, with a focus on particle placement, object shift and subject placement. Currently we are working within Ida's NFR-funded project Variation and Change in the Scandinavian Verb Phrase on building up a database of elicited production data, targetting variation with respect to consituent order in the Scandinavian languages. The elicitation method and the background research questions are described in the article The Nordic Word order Database: motivations, methods, material and infrastructure (accepted for publication). The database can also be browsed here: https://tekstlab.uio.no/nwd . Other related work is Ida's and my chapter on particle placement diachronally and synchronally in Swedish and Norwegian (again, only Swedish). For a more diachronic focus, see our poster from DiGS 2017: Argument Placement in Scandinavian - Stable Variation and Parametric Change. More news about the database to follow soon!
Second language acquistion
Since Aumtumn 2016, I have been involved in a couple L2 acquisition projects.
The syntax-prosody interface
The CASTL-fish research group at UiT had a strong focus on the syntax-prosody interface 2017-2018. Some of my work on the topic is listed below. My work on Scandinavian word order variation is recently also more oriented towards prosody. Some recent work below:
Norwegian heiritage speakers in America
Recently, I have been involved in two projects that build on the recordings of Norwegian heritage speakers, as collected in the CANS-corpus (Corpus of American Nordic Speech). The first one is a collaboration with Merete Anderssen and Marit Westergaard on noun phrase strucuture (possesives and definite expressions). This work centers around Merete and Marit's extensive research on the structure and acquisition of noun phrases in Norwegian. The article Crosslinguistic similarities and differences in bilingual acquisition and attrition: Possessives and double definiteness in Norwegian heritage language is now out in Binlingualism: Language and Cognitiion. The seocnd collaboration is with Terje Lohndal and Marit Westergaard on V2 in heritage Norwegian -- updates to follow soon!
Scandinavian dialect syntax
A lot of my research targets syntactic microvariation within and between the Scandinavian languages. I was a researcher in ScanDiaSyn/NorDiaCorp project 2010-2013, together with Kristine Bentzen, Piotr Garbacz, Janne Bondi Johannessen (project leader), Ida Larsson and Øystein Vangsnes (project leader). This resultet in volume 1 of Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (online), with more than 60 articles each targetting the dialect varation with respect to a specific syntactic phenomenon. My articles (17) mainly cover argument structure/verb phrase syntax (overview here) and binding/co-reference (see overview here). More about micro-variation with respect to binding can be found in my paper On inter-individual variation and mid-distance binding in Swedish (2013, Working paper in Scandinavian Syntax).
Voice, category change and argument structure
Most of my work earlier was centered around different types of passives and nominalizations. I'm still working modelling the choice of passive in Swedish (periphrastic or synthetic), and the relationship between argument structure and category (adjectival and verbal particles, "big" and "small" nominalizations). Some work that still bears some relevanc is listed below, with links to published or unpublished material.
The locus of cross-linguistic variation
A common theme of my research is linguistic variation, both within and between languages and even speakers. Several of the publications above, e.g. the causative paper and the mid-distance reflexives paper. Other relevant work, with a focus on differences between Swedish and English, are listed below.
Localizing cross-linguistic variation in Tense systems: On telicity and stativity in Swedish and English (2012, in Nordic Journal of Linguistics, fulltext here)
Contact, Animacy, and Affectedness in Germanic (2012, with Gillian Ramchand, in Comparative Germanic Syntax: the state of the art, fulltext here)
First language acquisition;
Second language acquisition;
Language impairment (pathology);
Heritage language acquisition;
Child bilingualism;
Syntactic processing in language comprehension and production;
Eye-movement during reading and listening (both children and adults).
Forskningsinteresser:
Mine forskningsinteresser inkludererer sammenlignende språkvitenskap, syntaks, pragmatikk og informasjonsstruktur, nordiske dialekter, barnespråk, første- og andrespråktilegnelse, flerspråklighet, språkrevitalisering, norsk, norske dialekter, nordiske språk, samiske språk og engelsk.
Jeg har bakgrunn fra teoretisk syntaks, spesielt forholdet mellom syntaks og informasjonsstruktur. I doktorgraden min (2007) undersøkte jeg ordstillingsvariasjon i nordnorske dialekter, i sammenligning med andre skandinaviske språk/dialekter. Avhandlinga mi inkluderer også et kapittel om førstespråkstilegnelse av ordstillingsmønstre underordnede setninger på nordnorsk.
Etter doktorgraden har jeg fortsatt å forske på teoretisk syntaks og informasjonsstruktur, og på språktilegnelse.
Jeg har også kommet tilbake til et tema jeg jobbet med i mastergraden min (2000), nemlig språktilegnelse hos flerspråklige barn, og tverrspråklig påvirkning.
Et annet forskningsfelt som jeg har begynt å jobbe med i senere år omhandler samiske språk, og da spesielt nordsamisk og språktilegnelse hos samiskspråklige barn. Fra 2011-2017 ledet jeg prosjektet DASAGO (Davvisámigiel mánáid giellaovdáneapmi – North Sami child language acquisition), finansiert av Forskningsrådet. I dette prosjektet jobbet vi blant annet med å utvikle en tilpasning av MacArthur-Bates CDI (Communicative Development Inventory) til nordsamisk, samt at vi samlet inn et barnespråkskorpus av nordsamisktalende barn. Vi undersøkte også ulike grammatiske fenomener i samisk (barne)språk med utgangspunkt i dette korpuset. Vi jobber fortsatt med materiale som ble samlet inn i forbindelse med dette prosjektet.
Til sist har jeg nå begynt å sette meg inn i et tema som jeg lenge har vært interessert i, nemlig språkvansker. Jeg holder for tida på med en mastergrad i logopedi, og håper å forske på denne tematikken i fremtida.
For tida jobber jeg med blant annet:
Jeg er involvert i følgende eksterne prosjekter:
Jeg studerer hvordan barn og voksne tilegner seg og bruker flere språk. Forskningen min har fokusert på førstespråk, andrespråk og tredjespråkstilegnelse, samt tospråklighet og språklig attrisjon, for det meste ved å bruke et psykolingvistisk eksperimentelt tilnærming.
Sentrale stikkord er
Forskningsprosjekter
Syntaks og grensesnittene med form (morfologi-fonologi) og betydning (semantikk); språkvitenskapelig teori.
Deskriptiv lingvistikk, feltlingvistikk, språkdokumentasjon, flerspråklighet, tospråklighet, språkkontakt, grammatisk låning, morfologisk låning, språklig typologi, grammatikkskriving, polylektale grammatikker, afrikansk lingvistikk, språk i Midtøsten, afroasiatiske språk, berberisk (amazigh), arabisk, dialektologi.
Forskningen min fokuserer på flerspråkighet, språkinlærning, språklig bevisst undervisning og grensesnittet mellom språk og kognisjon, spesielt i personer med nevrologisk sykdom.
2025-2026 vil jeg samarbeide med PhD Antti Saloranta (gjesteforsker i kvensk språk ved UiT) for å undersøke det kvenske språkets fonetiske system ved å sammenligne arkiv- og egeninnsamlede taledata. I tillegg vil vi undersøke mulige forskjeller i oppfatningen av lydsystemet og grammatikken i kvensk og finsk ved hjelp av psykofysiologiske målinger.
My current research focuses on better understanding the formal and cognitive restrictions on harmony processes and expanding our understanding of the typology of harmony. To achieve this, I am using artificial grammar learning techniques to explore biases in learnability, cognition, and theoretical linguistcs that limit the range of possible harmony processes that can arise in natural language.
You can learn more about my work at https://jennatconklin.weebly.com/.
My research focuses on the neural and cognitive consequences of bilingualism and how these lead to the prevention and mitigation of cognitive aging.
C-LaBL organiserer jevnlige seminarer, gjesteforelesninger og lesegrupper, du kan klikke på knappene nedenfor for semesterplanene (på engelsk). Du kan også sjekke kalenderen vår på AcqVA Lab-siden (her).
Flere språk til flere 
Flere språk til flere er formidlingskanalen til C-LaBL. Vi er en gren av forsknings- og informasjonssenteret Bilingualism Matters, et globalt nettverk med mer enn 25 universiteter som arbeider med flerspråklighet, grunnlagt av professor Antonella Sorace i 2008. Målet vårt er å formidle forskningsfunn om flerspråklighet og språklæring til et bredere publikum. Vi mener at det er mange fordeler ved å ha mer enn ett språk.
Ønsker du å lære mer om flerspråklighet og språklæring? Flere språk til flere kan:
For ytterligere informasjon, råd eller for å avtale en presentasjon, send oss gjerne en e-post på Postboks-FSF@HSL.uit.no. Du kan følge oss på Facebook eller besøke nettstedet vårt.
Flere språk til flere ledes av Yulia Rodina.
