News archive

Here are some photos from the Science Is Wonderful! fair by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions where Maki Kubota, Judith Schlenter and Marit Westergaard represented the AcqVA Aurora Center.

We are hiring! Apply for a two-year Postdoc position in Multilingual Minds (MuMin) project here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/230010/postdoctoral-research-fellow-in-psycholinguistics

NB: The deadline is the 1st of October!

ISBPAC 2022 - 4th International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children, August 4th and 5th, 2022.

AcqVA Aurora was delighted to host #ISBPAC 2022!

We enjoyed all the fantastic talks, posters, and discussions and were happy to see so many prolific researchers gathering together!

You can see more details of the conference on its website.

See you at #ISBPAC2024!

Amazing news! Two Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships were granted to caome work at AcqVA!

Kirill Elin is coming to AcqVA Aurora to work with Vincent DeLuca and Janson Rothman. He has a great project that fits squarely into Theme IV of AcqVA and very complementary to the large Bilingualism and Cognitive Aging Project we are running now at UiT.

Marina Sokolova is coming to work with Anne Dahl and Terje Lohndal in AcqVA NTNU for two years.

The latest episode of Kletsheads in English featured a study by our dearest Yulia Rodina, Tanja Kupisch, Natalia Meir, Natalia Mitrofanova, Olga Urek & Marit Westergaard: Internal and External Factors in Heritage Language Acquisition: Evidence From Heritage Russian in Israel, Germany, Norway, Latvia and the United Kingdom. Frontiers in Education https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00020.

Listen it here.

Abstract Submission deadline: March 1st, 2022

The 4^th International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children (ISBPAC 2022)

August 4th and 5th, 2022

The Aurora Center for Language Acquisition, Variation & Attrition (AcqVA Aurora) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway is pleased to invite you to the 4^th International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children (ISBPAC 2022) on August 4th and 5th, 2022. 

ISBPAC aims to bring together researchers who investigate bi-/multilingualism from various disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, multimodal communication, and language pedagogy, addressing language acquisition and processing in any domain of language as well as the neurocognition and neurobiology of bi-multilingualism.

Keynote Speakers

Gigi Luk, McGill University

Viorica Marian, Northwestern University

Eleonora Rossi, University of Florida

Zofia Wodniecka, Jagiellonian University

*Call for papers:*

The symposium welcomes submissions for all types of bi/multilinguals related to linguistic acquisition and processing and for studies examining the role bi/multilingualism plays in (neuro)cognition. This includes early and late bilinguals, L2 and Ln learners, all domains of language (syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, the lexicon and discourse/pragmatics, and their interfaces) and language related neurocognition, employing on-line (e.g., self-paced reading or listening, eye tracking, ERPs, neuroimaging techniques) and offline methods. The topics are but not limited to:

• Morphological, syntactic, phonetic, phonological, lexical processing
• Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual speech production and comprehension
• Code-switching
• Cognitive consequences of bi-/multilingualism
• Language processing in attrition
• Implications of bi-/multilingual language processing for teaching
• Neuroscientific studies of bilingual processing
• Multimodal language and communication

Abstract Submission: OPEN NOW!

• We accept submissions for poster and/or talks.
• Abstracts should be no more than 500 words maximum (Times New Roman size 12, with one additional page for examples, tables, figures and (selected) references).
• Title should be visible (preferably centered at top of page, in bold, in sentence case).
• Please make the abstract fully anonymous: authors’ names, affiliations, or pictures should not be indicated/included anywhere in the document.

Please submit your abstract via EasyChair here: 

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=isbpac2022

Important Dates

Conference: August 4th and 5th, 2022

Abstract Submission deadline: March 1st, 2022

Notification of Acceptance: May 1st, 2022

Registration: May 1st, 2022 opens

Early Bird Registration: May 1st, 2022 – June 15th, 2022

Venue

UiT The Arctic University of Norway

ISBPAC 2021 Organizers

• Maki Kubota (co-chair)
• Fatih Bayram (co-chair)
• Nadine Kolb
• Yanina Prystauka
• Aleksandra Tomic
• Khadij Gharibi
• Alicia Luque
• Jason Rothman
• Vincent De Luca
• Marit Westergaard

Assistant Organizers

• Aleksandra Bogoiavlenskaia

Student Travel Awards

Five such awards will be awarded for in person attendance at this conference. This award is funded by the AcqVA AURORA Center and is meant to assist students who are interested in attending ISBPAC2022 by offsetting some of their expenses with a stipend of up to 5000 NOK.

Preference is given to applicants with the greatest financial need. Both PhD and MA students are encouraged to apply. Once the submission portal is open, we will have a question indicating whether you would like to be considered for this Student Award when submitting your abstract and space for you to indicate your need, e.g., the extent to which you are eligible for some or no funding from your home institution.

Contact

Please direct any questions about the conference to Maki Kubota and/or Fatih Bayram: isbpac2022@gmail.com

Are you interested in doing a postdoc project on multilingualism in an active and productive research environment?

Then you should consider applying for a Marie Curie fellowship to join the AcqVA Aurora Centre (Acquisition, Variation & Attrition) at UiT!

We have five (!) prolific researchers that may become your MSCA supervisor.

Send us your CV and a brief proposal by Feb 25 to join a 3-day workshop in Tromsø in June, focusing on how to write a successful MSCA proposal (the application deadline this year is Sept 14)!

Your future supervisors are:

• Marit Westergaard https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/736212
• Natalia Mitrofanova https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/736699
• Martin Krämer https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/735439
• Fatih Bayram https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/739707
• Øystein Vangsnes https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/742704

A 2-year postdoc position is available at UiT for the project ADIM (Across-Domain Investigations in Multilingualism), funded by EEA Norway grants, PIs Magdalena Wrembel (Poznan) and Marit Westergaard (UiT). One corresponding postdoc position will soon be advertised at NTNU in Trondheim, and two at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.

Application deadline January 30, 2022 (preferred starting date May 1).

https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/216699/postdoctoral-researchfellow-in-multilingualism

Jorge González Alonso landed a prestigious grant from the Research Council of Norway this June for the project LESS (Linguistic Economy through transfer Source Selectivity: A neurocognitive investigation of linguistic transfer in multilingualism). However, since he had already moved back to Spain, it was unclear whether he would accept the grant. After some negotiations with the RCN and UiT, Jorge has now decided to return to UiT in a 25% position for three years, starting December 1. The project will hire a postdoc for 2 years from the fall of 2022, and it will additionally fund a number of Research Assistants working on data collection, in Spain and in Norway. Here is a brief description of LESS:

The primary objective of LESS is to examine how the mind reuses and repurposes linguistic knowledge when it is similar across languages, helping to avoid repetition in learning, and how this efficiency is implemented at the level of brain function. This phenomenon, called linguistic transfer, can be studied most meaningfully in multilingualism (three or more languages), because the learner has more linguistic experience/knowledge available. This rich background raises the stakes: choosing the right language, the one that is most similar to the language we are learning, becomes a crucial task that can lead to shortcuts in learning or to costly errors that must later be undone. LESS examines the psychological mechanisms and neurophysiological correlates behind this unconscious selection. In the process, it secondarily addresses the role of core cognitive components, such as attention and memory, in detecting and tracking cross-linguistic similarities that lead to linguistic transfer.

This is fantastic news – for Jorge, for AcqVA Aurora and UiT, and for all of us who will have Jorge as a colleague again!

We did it again this year! Two Marie Skłodowska-Curie grants to our great team – to Brechje van Osch for the project HeLA (supervisors Jason Rothman and Terje Lohndal) and to Judith Schlenter for the project INSPIRE (supervisor Marit Westergaard).

The project HeLA aims to fill important gaps in our existing knowledge of Heritage Language (HL) acquisition, a subfield of bilingualism studies. While most previous research has focused on describing how HLs diverge from their monolingual baselines, the main objective of HeLA is to understand why heritage grammars develop the way they do. To this end, we focus on the severely understudied population of pre-teenage heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish. While much attention has been paid to the role of input quantity in HL acquisition, relatively little is known about the qualitative nature of that input. This project investigates input quality by focusing on cross-generational attrition: the situation where HSs’ parents might exhibit changes in their L1 use –due to prolonged exposure to a second language and lack of activation in their first language– which get passed on to the next generation of HSs. We will approach this topic in a unique and novel way, namely by including individual analyses of children and their respective parents, and establishing a one-to-one connection between the two. Thus far, the majority of research on heritage Spanish, has been carried out in the context of the US. HeLA offers a valuable contribution to the field by comparing Spanish in two different linguistic contexts in Europe: the UK and The Netherlands. By looking at phenomena that are instantiated differently in English and Dutch –grammatical gender and subject expression– we will gain more insight into the role of cross-linguistic influence from the majority language. We furthermore combine behavioural and online measures of competence to examine whether the type of task brings anything to bear on the participants’ performances. Gaining a deep understanding of the factors that shape heritage grammars is of considerable importance for the maintenance of immigrant languages and cultures, as well as for stakeholders in the public and private sector charged with supporting such efforts.

The project INSPIRE (multilINgual Sentence Processing In Real-timE) will investigate two potential factors that influence multilingual sentence processing, cross-linguistic influence and language dominance, to shed light on the ongoing debate about how the language systems in a multilingual speaker's mind/brain interact. We will employ two time-sensitive methods, eye-tracking and mouse-tracking, to investigate how German native speakers living in Norway and non-native speakers of German whose native language is Norwegian process German case marking in different sentence structures (transitive structures, ditransitive structures); the findings will be compared to those obtained from a group of German native speakers in Germany. Unlike German, Norwegian has no morphological case on full noun phrases, but mostly relies on word order for sentence interpretation. Our experimental design not only enables us to investigate whether non-native speakers are affected by cross-linguistic influence from their first language (Norwegian) when processing German (and rely more on word order than case), but also how a change in language dominance affects sentence processing in German native speakers, i.e., whether they show a processing pattern that is more similar to that of the non-native group after longer exposure to and usage of Norwegian. Thus, INSPIRE will reveal whether cross-linguistic influence is bidirectional. The project will fill a gap in current research on language attrition by investigating real-time processing and will inform us how the lack of input and use can affect the processing of the first language.

Our very own Natalia Mitrofanova has just been notified that she has been granted approx. 10 mill NOK from the Research Council of Norway for her project proposal MuMin - Multilingual Minds: grammar interaction in multilingual acquisition. The project fits perfectly with the AcqVA Aurora profile (especially Theme 2) and will add another post-doc as well as a researcher to the group. Here is a brief project description:

The last decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in effort from several disciplines aimed to uncover the cognitive mechanisms of language acquisition and language processing, and to understand how language is organised in the mind. One important aspect of this enterprise is the study of whether and how multiple languages interact within multilingual minds. However, this question is difficult to address within current methodological approaches which compare the linguistic behaviour of bilingual children to that of their monolingual peers. In such setup it is impossible to establish whether differences between the groups are due to cross-linguistic influence (CLI) or to the reduced input that bilingual children receive in their two languages. In this project, we propose a new methodology which will enable us to disentangle CLI from the effects of reduced input. We will go beyond comparing bilingual children to monolinguals and make a comparison across multiple bilingual populations. In doing this, we will keep one language - the target - constant and vary the second language parametrically (based on the presence and absence of certain grammatical features). We will match the participants by their exposure to the target language, thus making sure that the only difference between the groups is their second language. This in turn means that if we find any differences in the way the bilingual groups comprehend or produce the target language, we will be able to confidently attribute these differences to the influence coming from their second languages. The findings of the project will have major implications for the theoretical models of languages in the mind, and for theoretical and practical aspects of language learning.

Natalia will be collaborating with a number of scholars in this project - Masha Polinsky, Irina Sekerina, Olga Dragoy, Tanja Kupisch, Sharon Unsworth, Silvia Perpinan, Natalia Kartushina as well as Yulia Rodina and Marit Westergaard here at UiT.

We are looking forward to a new and interesting project and to further collaboration with Natalia and her team. 

     DUE DATE: Jan. 22^nd, 2020; Decisions expected within 2 months thereafter

     Applications emailed to AcqVA Aurora Center Assistant:  Zeynep Sancak Sert at: zeynep.s.sert@uit.no

      In an effort to foster synergies across researchers and, especially, research that cross-cuts themes within the four of the AcqVA Aurora centre (https://uit.no/research/acqva), we are pleased to announce a new funding scheme providing small-scale seed funding for projects.

     Projects must clearly follow from the overarching goals and research questions of the center and align with at least one theme, although preference will be given to proposals that combine interests and approaches key questions within separate themes.  Thus, this funding marks an opportunity to demonstrate how the main questions that guide the center are not only applicable to each theme, but also can be approached to the benefit of multiple themes by combining and/or augmenting expertise across methodologies, perspectives and domains of inquiry.

     Applications are not intended to be subtractive of anyone’s time or increase bureaucracy, but rather to afford an opportunity for researchers to carve out practice in preparing initial plans and budgets for projects.  The hope, then, is that this serves as an opportunity to practice key skills needed for the preparation of external funding, project conceptualization and management.  Projects that demonstrate intention and/or potential for later external funding applications will also be prioritized. 

     We will have at least one call for this scheme per year.  Depending on interest, success and pending funding, we will consider running two calls per year.

     Proposals should consist of no more than one page (A4) project explanation accompanied by a detailed budget of how you intend to spend the up to 25,000 NOK one can apply for.  The project description, in addition to describing the scientific merit and details of the (empirical) study, should explicitly indicate its relevance to the center’s questions and, where relevant, its cross-thematic relevance and support (as well as team members).

     Small-scale funding

     In addition to the above scheme, small-scale funding can be applied for directly to the centre’s governance board at any time (email center director (marit.westergaard@uit.no) and/or deputy director (jason.rothman@uit.no) directly). This funding is meant for one-off, gap-fillers for emergent needs to complete or initiate research that falls in the remit of the AcqVA Aurora Center. This can include funding for MA thesis projects, if applied for in combination with an AcqVA Aurora associated researcher.  Decisions on funding will be taken jointly by the governance board at the next monthly meeting following the application submission.  An explanation of the context and needs of the monies in email form to the directors will suffice, however, we suggest that such requests are accompanied with the clear context of need and budgeting of expenditures, not least as decisions are made by the entire board and budgetary constraints may necessitate the board’s need to rank requests by priority. 

Excellent MSCA results for AcqVA Aurora

 

AcqVA Aurora had two successful MSCA applications and one on the reserve list:

Nadine Kolb (supervisors Merete Anderssen and Jason Rothman) for the INPUT project

Khadij Gharibi (supervisors Terje Lohndal and Jason Rothman) for the CLICK project

Reserve list: Gustavo Guajardo (supervisors Marit Westergaard and Jason Rothman) for the LILAC project

CONGRATULATIONS!

See also the AcqVA website here.

Our application to become an Aurora Center has been granted!!! This is a 30 million NOK grant from UiT that will make it possible to hire a number of new people and do many cool things over the next four years (see below for a summary of the center proposal).

Among the great news from the RCN this December, you can also read the following about UiT funding of research:

For å posisjonere de fremste miljøene ved UiT og gjøre dem sterke nok til å konkurrere eksternt har UiT opprettet en ordning med tildeling av såkalte Aurora-sentre. Det ble nylig kjent at UiT får to slike nye sentre. Disse er:

• Center for Language Acquisition, Variation & Attrition: The Dynamic Nature of Languages in the Mind som ledes av Marit Westergaard ved HSL-fakultetet
• Aurora Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems Modelling som ledes av Odd Erik Garcia ved NT-fakultetet.

Aurora-sentrene tildeles miljøer som er fremragende og som har en ambisjon om å søke Senter for fremragende forskning i Forskningsrådet ved neste utlysning. Jeg er stolt over at det ble sendt inn mange svært gode søknader. Det betyr at det er hard konkurranse i Aurora-sentersatsingen, sier UiT-rektor Anne Husebekk.

Center for Language Acquisition, Variation & Attrition (AcqVA):
The Dynamic Nature of Languages in the Mind

Director: Marit Westergaard

Principal investigators: Yulia Rodina & Fatih Bayram (Theme 1), Merete Anderssen & Natalia Mitrofanova (Theme 2), Øystein Vangsnes & Terje Lohndal (Theme 3), Jason Rothman & Evelina Leivada (Theme 4)

Summary

Humans are unique among animals in that we have language, a complex system enabling com­muni­cation about any topic, be it past, present or future. In fact, humans are not limited to one language, but can acquire several under the right conditions. Nevertheless, bi- and multilingualism (henceforth referred to as multilingualism, unless further specified) is not an either-or pheno­menon, as multi­lingual minds may (and typically do) undergo numerous changes across the lifespan, as a result of linguistic and non-linguistic factors. This means that multilingual minds comprise dyna­mic linguistic systems, as co-existing languages affect each other in a multi­tude of ways, both in the acquisition process and beyond. The AcqVA Aurora Center will conduct ecolo­gi­cally valid research, re­flect­ing today’s globa­lized world, where learning mul­tiple lan­guages at various points in the lifetime has become increasingly common. Our research will focus on a range of multi­lingual speaker groups and thus feed into current chal­lenges related to migration, education, and health, addressing important and yet unanswered questions for science and society. AcqVA Aurora will combine solid empi­ri­cal work with advanced theoretical (and statistical) model­ing in three domains: A) Acquisition: how multilingual minds develop in children and adults, B) Variation: how and why languages may differ considerably across indivi­duals and groups in space and time, and C) Attrition: how and why language erosion may occur over the course of the lifespan. The three domains will be studied within four cross-cutting themes, focusing on inter­related issues of multi­lingualism: 1) how linguistic and non-linguistic experiential factors shape linguistic and cognitive outcomes, 2) how multiple languages in the same mind influence each other, 3) how clo­sely related varieties co-existing in the same mind are processed, and 4) how representing and juggling multiple languages manifest and result in adaptations at the neurological and domain-general cognitive levels. Both senior and junior scholars will be repre­sented among the PIs, which will ensure future recruitment and fulfil the intention of the Aurora call, preparing team members for further grant proposals, e.g. a Center of Excellence (CoE) from the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and European Research Council grants (ERCs). AcqVA Aurora will hire four postdoctoral fellows and four inter­national Adjunct Professors (20%), one for each theme, plus a lab manager. Further­more, we will fill a gap in our current theoretical and methodological focus by hiring one full pro­fessor with a strong track record in neuro­cognition of multi­lingualism and qualifications in neuroimaging metho­dologies (e.g. MRI), com­plementing the beha­vioral and psycho­linguistic methods already in use in our labs. This means that AcqVA Aurora will add ten outstanding scholars to the current team, making UiT a world-leading center for research on the linguistic and cognitive sciences of multi­lingualism.

UiT The Arctic University of Norway has established The Arctic MSCA-IF program to recruit excellent young researchers planning to apply for a Marie Skƚodowska-Curie individual fellowship (MSCA-IF) to pursue a career in research.
Read more about the Arctic MSCA-IF program.

The newly established AcqVA Aurora Center invites applications from promising young researchers within the field of Language Acquisition and Multilingualism. The selected candidates will write a proposal for a 24-month MSCA-IF at UiT together with Merete Anderssen, Terje Lohndal, Yulia Rodina, Øystein Vangsnes or Marit Westergaard. This is an opportunity to accelerate your research career while living in the urban research city of Tromsø, uniquely located at the top of the world surrounded by some of Europe’s last pristine wild nature.

The supervisors are pre-selected by UiT The Arctic University of Norway through the Arctic MSCA-IF program. Successful postdoc candidates will be invited to Tromsø (travel and accommodation expenses covered) for a three-day MSCA-IF symposium May 26-28, 2020. At this event, the candidates will present their past research achievements, discuss future plans with their potential supervisor and learn how to write a successful MSCA-IF application. Together with the supervisor, the selected candidates will write their MSCA-IF application over the summer. Deadline September 9, 2020.

Further information about the individual calls.

Please send your CV (max 3 pages) and describe a research project that will strengthen and complement the presented research (max 2 pages) to one of the following:

marit.westergaard@uit.no
merete.anderssen@uit.no
yulia.rodina@uit.no
oystein.vangsnes@uit.no
terje.lohndal@uit.no

by Feb 7, 2020. Mark your Application ”Arctic MSCA”.