Research at the Center for Language, Brain and Learning (C-LaBL) investigates how multiple languages interact in the mind/brain. By fostering collaborative research across linguistic theories, neuroscience, and language acquisition/processing, we focus on the effects of multilingualism – for the languages involved, for the brains that house them, and for the learning and teaching of multiple languages.
C-LaBL is divided into three domains of study (Language, Brain, and Learning) that are linked by a cross-cutting research theme focusing on Linguistic Distance. The core work of C-LaBL investigates the interaction of multiple grammars in the multilingual mind/brain, with a main focus on the significance of linguistic distance (similarities/differences between languages) for: (1) development, (2) crosslinguistic influence, (3) neurocognitive adaptations in the brain as a result of multilingual experience, and (4) instructed additional language learning.
Our work is theoretically motivated and uses a variety of research methods, including offline behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
The center is funded by the Trond Mohn Foundation and UiT The Arctic University of Norway 2024-2030. C-LaBL builds on and expands research done in the AcqVA Aurora center, which is funded by the Aurora Center Program at UiT, 2020-2026.
For events at the center, take a look at the calendar.
C-LaBL consists of three domains, Language, Brain and Learning, which are by design tightly connected and feed into each other through an overarching research theme: Linguistic Distance.
Click on the domains below to read more.
PIs: Terje Lohndal, Natalia Mitrofanova, Marit Westergaard;
Professor II: Ludovica Serratrice
PIs: Jason Rothman, Vincent DeLuca;
Professor II: Jubin Abutalebi
PIs: Roumyana Slabakova, Anne Dahl, Øystein A. Vangsnes;
Professor II: Victoria Murphy
The director of C-LaBL is Professor Marit Westergaard and the deputy leader is Professor Jason Rothman.
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/
Jason Rothman is Professor of Linguistics at UiT and Adjunct Professor at senior fellow at the Nebrija Research Center in Cognition at the Universidad Nebrija (Spain). Prof. Rothman primarily works on language acquisition and processing across the life span, especially in various types of bilingualism and multilingualism. Focusing on understanding the variables that ultimately give rise to individual differences, he actively researches the mutually beneficial, bi-directional relationship between formal linguistic theory and experimental methods / evidence from psycho- and neurolinguistics. His work also investigates language induced / associated links to neurocognition across the entire lifespan, especially in various bilingual / multilingual populations.
He is director of the Psycholinguistics of Language Representation (PoLaR) lab at UiT: https://site.uit.no/polar/
I'm interested in language acquisition and language processing by children (L1 and 2L1) and adults (L1, L2, L3). My favourite research paradigms include Visual World eye-tracking, various production and comprehension experiments. I've worked on the acquisition and processing of locative prepositional phrases in early grammars, grammatical case and grammatical aspect (monolingual children and heritage language learners), V2, agreement and definiteness (L2 and L3 learners). The languages I'm primarily working on are Russian (monolingual and heritage), German, Norwegian, English and Spanish.
My research deals with various aspects of second and third language acquisition, i.e., the acquisition of language(s) after early childhood. I'm interested in both theoretical and applied aspects of acquisition. In particular, I am interested in how languages influence each other in the multilingual mind and in the relationship between implicit and explicit learning. I am also interested in multilingualism in a broad sense, and in multilingualism and language acquisition in schools.
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.
I am an Adjunct Professor in linguistics in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and also Professor of English linguistics in the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology. My PhD is from the University of Maryland (2012).
Research interests include: Comparative grammar, multilingualism, heritage languages, language acquisition, language change, grammatical gender, architecture of grammar, history of linguistics.
Awards and memberships
For more details, please consult my NTNU website.
My research is grounded in generative linguistic theory and explores the second language and additional (L2/Ln) acquisition process. My theoretical focus is the acquisition of grammatical structure and its interaction with meaning. I use online and offline psycholinguistic methodologies to investigate the following theoretical issues:
* What is the linguistic nature of the bilingual and multilingual grammar?
* Are there some properties of language (e.g. words, sounds, sentence structure) that are easier to acquire than others (e.g., functional morphemes, grammatical meanings)? Are there are some properties, such as pragmatic universals, that will come for free in the grammar of the learner?
* Can lexical, phrasal and sentence meaning be acquired in the additional language? How does the interface between form and meaning affect the L2/Ln acquisition of meaning?
* What is the effect of the native language in the acquisition of an additional language? What are the effects of the native and the second language in the acquisition of a third language?
* How does linguistic and processing complexity affect knowledge of meaning in the L2/Ln? How do children acquiring their native language and adult L2/Ln learners compare in this respect? * How can knowledge of additional language acquisition improve classroom learning and instruction?
Grammar, syntax, morphology, syntactic variation, North Germanic languages and dialects, language variation, multilingualism, bidialectalism, language acquisition, cognitive development, language attitudes
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.
Simultaneous first language bilingualism; heritage speaker bilingualism; language attrition in bilingualism; acquisition of morphosyntax; roles and weights of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in development/processing/ultimate attainment variation across bi/multilinguals.
My research interests include multilingualism, language acquisition, language attrition, heritage and community languages, language change and variation, and Slavic linguistics. I am interested in taking a combined psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approach to examining these research areas.
My previous research has focussed on grammatical borrowing and replication between Czech and English in two parallel communities, namely Czech South Australians and L1 English Ln Czech speakers in Prague. This research was qualitatively based, analysing naturalistic observational data and semi-structured interviews. I have also worked on language planning and policy, analysing and providing recommendations for improved linguistic accessibility for government services.
My current research as part of the ADIM project focuses on morphosyntactic crosslinguistic influence in L3 and Ln acquisition. The languages involved are English, Norwegian, Polish and artificial languages. The primary features being investigated are morphological cases and articles.
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).
My research interests include language acquisition and language processing in children and adults, monolingual, bi-/multilingual and heritage language speakers. In my work, I use experimental methods, such as the Visual World eye-tracking paradigm, eye-tracking during reading, behavioral tasks (e.g., elicited production, acceptability judgments).
My current research as part of the MuMiN project focuses on the role of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual child language acquisition to find out whether the different languages influence each other or develop independently and autonomously in the mind of a bilingual child. The particular focus is on the acquisition of Croatian as a heritage language. The empirical domain I am investigating is the grammatical aspect.
Other areas of my research include syntactic, morphological and discourse phenomena from a cross-linguistic perspective.
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:
Language separation in bidialectal speakers: evidence from eye tracking - (With Øystein Vangsnes. Recently submitted article about gender processing, grammar separation and language change.)
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!)
Dialect leveling as large scale mild language attrition (With Øystein Vangsnes. Poster presented at the CUNY colloquium 2017, covers partly the same data as the article 1 above.)
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)
Featurally underspecified forms are not treated as informative cues, even when they are sufficiently contrastive in the available context Evidence from the Visual World Paradigm (2016, Poster presented at AMLaP 2016, Bilbao)
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.
Adventures in Structural Priming - The search for effects of Argument Structure. Argument Structure and Linguistic Processing (presentation at the Ars-Ling workshop at the 28th Colloquium of Generative Grammar, Tarragona, 2018, the whole slideshow is available here). A follow-up study was presented AMLaP 2019 (with Corley and Wittenberg), find slideshow here .
Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English (Article in Glossa, 2016, with Tungseth, Corley, Sorace and Ramchand)
Transitivity Alternations in English: Processing Subcategorization frames (Poster, AMLaP 2014, Ramchand, Lundquist, Tungseth, Corley and Sorace)
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.
Testing the bottleneck hypothesis: acquisition of English morphology and word order by Norwegain students. (Collaboration with Isable Jensen, Roumyana Slabakova and Marit Westergaard: article under review - updates and links coming soon.)
Acquistion of word order in L2 Norwegian: Object Shift and Subject shift (Ongoing work with Merete Andersen, Kristine Bentzen, Guro Busterud (NTNU), Anne Dahl (NTNU) and Marit Westergaard, article under revision - updates and links coming soon)
Gender processing by Greek and Turkish L2 speakers of Norwegian (Since last year I've been helping out with an eye tracking study run at MultiLing in Oslo about Greek and Turkish L1 speakers' processing of gender in Norwegian. The first results were presented as a poster at AMLaP 2019. Find the poster here.
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:
Mer om de preverbala adverbialens syntax, semantik och prosodi (2018, article in Norsk lingvistisk tidskrift about V3 in Swedish triggered by preverbal adverbs)
Morpho-syntactic restrictions on right- and left-headed maximal prosodic words in Mainland Scandinavian (2018, abstract for FINO workshop, find full slideshow here)
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 role of tense-copying and syncretism in the licesing of morphological passives in the Nordic languages (2015, Studia Linguistica)
The category of participles (2013, in chapter in Categorization and category change, which summarises my views on participles and nominalizations)
Double object passives, pseudo-passives and the complete loss of Case in Swedish (Extended handout from LAGB workshop on Double objects, 2015)
Noun-verb conversion without a generative lexicon (2009, in Nordlyd special issue on Nanosyntax).
Nominalizations and participles in Swedish (2008, PhD thesis from the University of Tromsø)
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.
Objects as locations in English and Mainland Scandinavian (with Gillian Ramchand, article in Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 2013)
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)
My research focuses on early and late bi/multilingualism, with a particular interest in Spanish in contact with other languages. The main questions I aim to investigate qre 1) which areas of language are susceptible to change in bi/multilingual populations? 2) How can two or more languages influence each other in the bi/multilingual mind and society? and 3) How do the quantity and quality of the input determine language development and outcomes in bilinguals?
Research projects
My research focuses on real-time sentence processing in different groups of speakers. In my research, I use different experimental methods, such as the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, to study how and when listeners exploit information sources like morphological case marking for interpretation. I am interested in potential differences between groups of speakers, for example, between native and non-native or native-dominant and bi-/multilingual speakers, and the sources of these differences (e.g., cross-linguistic influence).
I am an open science enthusiast. All data and scripts of my published work can be found online on the Open Science Framework (OSF).
heritage speaker bilingualism; child language acquisition; acquisition of morphosyntax; roles and weights of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in development/processing/ultimate attainment; variation across bi/multilinguals
Psycho- and neurolinguistics; language acquisition and the mental representation of language; sentence processing; L1 and L2 variation; multilingualism, multilectalism and their extra-linguistic cognitive effects; Scandinavian languages and dialects.
For a complete list of publications, please check the members’ webpages or individual research profiles in CRIStin (Current Research Information System in Norway). Publication highlights from previous years may be found on the AcqVA website.
Flere språk til flere 
Flere språk til flere (More languages to more people) is C-LaBL’s outreach service. We are a branch of the research and information center Bilingualism Matters, a global network of more than 25 universities working on multilingualism, founded by Prof. Antonella Sorace in 2008. Our goal is to communicate research findings on multilingualism and language learning to a broader public. We believe that everyone can enjoy the benefits of having more than one language.
Do you want to know more about multilingualism and language learning? Flere språk til flere can:
For further information, advice or to arrange a talk, please email us at Postboks-FSF@HSL.uit.no. You can follow us on Facebook or visit our website.
Flere språk til flere is directed by Yulia Rodina.
