C-LaBL
Center for Language, Brain & Learning
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.
CIs: Terje Lohndal, Natalia Mitrofanova, Marit Westergaard, Sergey Minor;
Professor II: Ludovica Serratrice
CIs: Jason Rothman, Vincent DeLuca;
Professor II: Jubin Abutalebi
CIs: 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.
Grammar, syntax, morphology, syntactic variation, North Germanic languages and dialects, language variation, multilingualism, bidialectalism, language acquisition, cognitive development, language attitudes
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.
I investigate how children and adults acquire and use multiple languages. My research has focused on first, second and third language acquisition as well as on child bilingualism and language attrition, mostly using a psycholinguistic experimental approach.
Important keywords are
Research projects
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?
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/
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 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 the brain and it´s assosciated cognitive processes. I study how these neural and cognitive adaptations dynamically shift over time and with changes to patterns of language use, using behavorial experiment designs and EEG
child language acquisition; heritage speaker bilingualism; acquisition of morphosyntax and prosody; roles and weights of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in development/processing/ultimate attainment; variation across bi/multilinguals
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).
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.
Syntax and its interfaces with form (morphology-phonology) and meaning (semantics); linguistic theory.
My research interests include language acquisition and language processing by different groups of children and adults – monolingual, bilingual/multilingual and heritage language speakers – with a special focus on the acquisition and processing of Croatian in contact with other languages. I rely on experimental methods to study language, in particular the Visual World eye-tracking paradigm, WebGazer, eye-tracking during reading and behavioural tasks (e.g., elicited production, acceptability judgments). In my current and previous research, I have focused on various linguistic phenomena that I investigate from a cross-linguistic perspective, such as grammatical aspect and case, reference, anaphora resolution, implicit causality, negation, semantics of connectives, etc.
My academic interests encompass speech and language therapy, multilingualism, and clinical linguistics. I primarily work with acquired disorders of language, speech, and communication, with a particular focus on exploring solutions for the assessment and treatment of multilingual individuals. Additionally, I am interested in how the management of multilingual individuals with aphasia and dementia can inform linguistic models of multilingual processing.
Research interests:
My research interests are broad, and include comparative linguistics, syntax, pragmatics and information structure, dialects syntax, child language, first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, language revitalization, and language disorders. I primarily work with the following languages: Norwegian (and Norwegian/Nordic dialects), Northern Sami, and English.
I have a background in theoretical syntax, in particular on the interface between syntax and information structure. For my PhD (2007) I investigated word order variation in embedded clauses in Northern Norwegian, and also compared this with other Scandinavian varieties. My thesis also included a chapter on the acquisition of word order in Northern Norwegian embedded clauses.
Since my PhD I have continued working on theoretical syntax and information structure, and on language acquisition.
I have also picked up again the topic from my Master’s thesis (2000), namely bilingual language acquisition and cross-linguistic influence.
Another research interest that has emerged over the years related to first language acquisition of Northern Sami. From 2011-2017 I was the leader of the project DASAGO (Davvisámigiel mánáid giellaovdáneapmi – North Sami child language acquisition), in which we adapted the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Communicative Development Inventory) into North Sami, collected child language corpora of Sami child language, and investigated various grammatical aspects in Sami child language. We are still working on material collected for this project.
Finally, I have recently decided to approach a topic I have long been fascinated by, namely language disorders. I am currently doing a Master’s degree on speech therapy, and hope to do some research into this area in the near future.
My current research interests include:
I’m involved in the following external projects:
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?
My research focuses on multilingualism, language learning, linguistically responsive teaching and the interface between language and cognition, especially in people with neurological disease.
2025–2026 I will work together with PhD Antti Saloranta (guest research in Kven language at UiT) to investigate the phonetic system of the Kven language by comparing archival and self-collected speech data. In addition, we will examine possible differences in the perception of the sound system and grammar in Kven and Finnish by using psychophysiological measurements.
My research focuses on the neural and cognitive consequences of bilingualism and how these lead to the prevention and mitigation of cognitive aging.
My research interests fall within the domains of first and second language acquisition, language processing, bi/multilingualism and language disorders.
C-LaBL organises regular events, click the buttons below for the semester schedule. You can also check our calendar on the AcqVA Lab page (here). If you want to receive calendar invitations and updates from C-LaBL, you can subscribe to our mailing list (you can add your first name and last name in the subject of the email, but be sure to leave the body blank!).
C-LaBL hosts seminars almost every week (usually on Thursdays) on various topics related to the research interests of C-LaBL. Lunch seminars are held as hybrid meetings and are open to all.
Organizers: Sara Košutar, Pouran Seifi
Time: Thursdays 12:00-13:00*
If you want to present at the Lunch Seminars contact Sara Košutar.
For talks from previous semesters, please see the AcqVA Aurora event page.
Marie-Josée "Joe" H. Halsør
C-LaBL Admin Workshop
Kirill Erin
Mastering the Flanker: The Impact of Multilingualism
Pablo Bernabeu
Unpacking ERP Responses in Artificial Language Learning
Abstract:
Third language acquisition often involves morphosyntactic transfer from previously acquired languages. Research suggests that crosslinguistic influence follows systematic patterns, with attention playing a role in selecting the source of transfer. This study investigates morphosyntactic transfer longitudinally using artificial languages distributed between groups in two sites: Norway (Mini-Norwegian and Mini-English) and Spain (Mini-Spanish and Mini-English).
Kamil Długosz
Bidirectional interactions between symmetric and asymmetric grammatical gender systems in bilingual language comprehension and production
Abstract:
The aim of this talk is to present the BISAGS project, which investigates bidirectional interactions between two grammatical gender systems during language production and comprehension in Polish native speakers learning German or Danish. Polish is structurally similar to German, as both languages distinguish three gender classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter), whereas Danish differs by distinguishing only two (common and neuter). BISAGS also examines factors that may modulate these interactions, including L2 proficiency level, linguistic context (bare noun, noun phrase, sentence), and cognate status. The project employs both comprehension and production experiments, such as translation recognition and picture naming, as well as visual world eye-tracking.
Yulia Rodina
Direct objects in child heritage language speakers of Bosnian and Serbian in Norway
Abstract:
This study examines the structural and morphological features of direct object realization through various types of direct objects – noun phrases, clitic pronouns, and null objects – in child heritage speakers of Bosnian and Serbian in contact with Norwegian. The study focuses on the role of language-internal factors, individual language experience variables, lexical proficiency, and crosslinguistic influence in shaping direct object usage. Direct objects were elicited in the discourse settings where the referring element has been mentioned in a previous context, such as in response to the question, “What did Mia do to the monkey?”. We used the Q-BEx (De Cat et al., 2022) to capture the individual language experience factors and MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2012) to measure lexical proficiency. Participants were 32 HSs of Bosnian and Serbian between the ages of 5;5 and 10;4 (M = 93 months, SD = 14 months). Child HSs of Bosnian and Serbian were sensitive to discourse-pragmatic (information structure) constraints, showing a preference for clitics followed by null objects and NPs. The individual language experience variables significantly affected the children’s object realization preferences. We argue against morphological deficiency despite the observed increase in the rate of null objects. The potential vulnerability of the feminine clitic je is likely due to the complex morphosyntactic patterns of Bosnian and Serbian.
Brechje van Osch
Gender assignment in unlingual and code-switched speech in German-Italian bilingual
Abstract:
This study investigates how bilingual speakers of two languages with grammatical gender – German and Italian – assign gender when they code-switch, particularly when inserting German nouns into Italian speech. Prior research has documented four strategies: assigning the gender of the noun from the embedded language; the gender of the translation equivalent in the matrix language; using a default masculine gender, or applying a shape-based rule (e.g., assigning feminine gender to nouns ending in -a). Much of this research has focused on language pairs with non-overlapping gender systems, such as English-Spanish. This study addresses that gap by focusing on Italian-German bilinguals. 25 adult early German-Italian bilinguals living in Germany completed an elicited production task both in unilingual Italian and in Italian with German noun insertions. In unilingual Italian mode, participants performed at ceiling, showing full command of Italian gender. In the code-switching mode, where German nouns were inserted into Italian, results showed a strong effect of gender congruency: congruent nouns retained their shared gender, but incongruent nouns tended to default to masculine — especially when the nouns were cognates. Notably, there was significant individual variation in strategies, which are related to use and proficiency in both languages.
Pouran Seifi
Preliminary Data Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Influence in Multilingual Sentence Processing: Insights from Eye-Tracking and Grammaticality Judgments
Abstract:
This study investigates the impact of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) on L3 English sentence processing in Heritage Turkish (HT) adolescents, comparing them to monolingual Turkish and Norwegian speakers. We focused on four morpho-syntactic properties: definite articles, quantifier-noun agreement, adverb placement, and topicalization. A total of 84 participants (28 per group) completed eye-tracking and grammaticality judgment tasks. The results show that both the heritage language (Turkish) and the societal language (Norwegian) influence L3 English processing, but with varying effects. Norwegian facilitated HT speakers' performance in properties like definite articles and quantifier-noun agreement due to structural overlap with English. In contrast, Turkish exhibited a non-facilitative effect, especially in tasks related to these properties. Adverb placement and topicalization showed interference from L1 Turkish and non-facilitative influence from L2 Norwegian. These findings highlight how CLI shapes both real-time processing and grammaticality judgment, with societal language influence being more beneficial when its structures align with English.
Yulia Rodina
Flere språk til flere - updates
Camilo R. Ronderos
The social dimension of mindreading: Developmental evidence for the role of social categorization during utterance interpretation
Abstract:
Work in developmental pragmatics has shown that even though infants display refined mindreading abilities, older children struggle to understand language phenomena that rely on mindreading. This apparent mismatch could be partially explained by considering children’s growing sensitivity to social categories such as their interlocutor’s age. Based on recent work in philosophy of mind, we investigated how social categorization impacts children’s developing mindreading abilities during language comprehension. We tested the hypothesis that social-category-based reasoning follows the same developmental trajectory typically described for children’s mindreading skills. In a picture-selection task, Norwegian participants (ages 3-9, N=119) made decisions regarding a speaker’s (child or adult) preferences by choosing between images showing stereotypically child-coded and adult-coded items. Young children preferentially selected the child-coded image regardless of the speaker’s age, while older children preferred the stereotypically adult-coded image when they heard the adult speaker only. Participants’ performance in the picture-selection task was not predicted by their scores on a standard false-belief task. These results suggest that mindreading has a social dimension that develops in tandem with - but possibly independently from - other mindreading abilities. We argue that future studies in developmental pragmatics should consider social-category differences between participants and speakers when drawing conclusions about children’s mindreading abilities and how these are reflected in their interpretation of verbal utterances.
Jade Sandstedt
Multilectal influence on reading: Language, Brain and Learning
Abstract:
How do speakers represent and manage narrow linguistic variation within their language(s) (e.g., cross-dialectal differences, sociolinguistic variability, optionality, etc.), and how does exposure to such variation influence real-time language processing? This talk addresses these questions by examining how dialect-standard differences and sociolinguistic variability shape grammatical processing and reading comprehension using EEG and SPR reading comprehension studies.
Recent EEG studies reveal that readers’ sensitivity to grammatical errors in standard written language is significantly modulated by both dialect background and individual sociolinguistic profiles. Readers whose dialect grammatically aligns with the standard exhibit robust neurophysiological responses to morphosyntactic violations, while those exposed to greater linguistic variability show attenuated responses and reduced grammaticality judgment accuracy. These effects scale with individual language use and reflect both cross-dialectal and within-community variation, raising important questions about how minority dialect exposure influences reading and how speakers adapt to microvariation in their language(s).
To explore these effects in more natural reading contexts, we present preliminary findings from online self-paced reading experiments which examine how readers process morphosyntactic contrasts between Norway’s two written standards, Nynorsk and Bokmål, focussing on how multilectal language engagement, exposure, and dialect-standard differences shape processing in less constrained and more natural reading settings. Results show clear Nynorsk- and Bokmål-specific processing: identical inflected forms (e.g., Nynorsk båt-ane/kast-ar vs. Bokmål båt-ene/kast-er ‘boats-DEF.PL. / throw-PRES.’) elicit opposite reading time costs depending on the written standard in use, indicating that readers maintain distinct, context-sensitive grammatical expectations across their lects. However, these same readers show no increased costs in dialect-standard contrastive versus non-contrastive conditions, suggesting that minority dialect exposure does not impair reading performance under more natural reading conditions.
Together, these findings provide evidence for the coexistence and interaction of closely related grammatical systems in multilectal readers but highlight the adaptability of multilectals at navigating narrow linguistic diversity, challenging deficit-based assumptions about dialect use in education.
To be announced.
To be announced
The C-LaBL Guest Lecture Series invites outstanding researchers from all over the world approximately once a month.
C-LaBL hosts six reading groups, each focused on a specific topic. To view the schedule for each group, click the buttons below.
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.
C-LaBL is active on LinkedIn, Bluesky , and Facebook (our X account only exists to protect our name). Video recordings are available on our YouTube channel.
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You can participate in our work by taking part in our studies through the AcqVA Lab and the PoLaR Lab, or you can join our research effort by applying for a position!
