Across-Domain Investigations in Multilingualism (ADIM) - EEA Norway grants (2022 - 2024)

ADIM focuses on three groups of multilingual learners who share the same language repertoire but vary in their specific profiles with respect to the setting and stage of acquisition. Participants are L1 speakers of Polish with English as L2 acquiring Norwegian as an L3 in instructed and naturalistic settings respectively, both at initial and advanced stages of acquisition, and Polish/Norwegian L1 bilinguals acquiring English as an L3. While L3 research has so far predominantly been based on e.g. acceptability judgement tasks (for syntax) or perception/production tests (for phonology), the ADIM project will supplement these with methodology that has so far generally not been common in this field, EEG/ERPs and eyetracking. The novelty of the present project pertains to how electrophysiological evidence combined with more traditional behavioral methods can inform the theory of L3 acquisition, in particular, to examine transfer source selectivity in L3/Ln. ADIM will further test and modify existing theoretical models of L3 acquisition so that they offer an optimal explanatory framework which can account for the complexity of the acquisition process in the multilingual mind. The project will thus contribute to a greater understanding of multilingual competence and its acquisition and processing in general, but it will also document the speech patterns of Polish-Norwegian multilingual communities with different constellations of stage and setting of acquisition.

EEA Norway grants