AcqCESS - Acquisition & Attrition: Crosslinguistic Effects of Structural Similarity

The AcqCESS project investigates gender and case, two morphosyntactic properties that are noto­riously difficult to acquire in multilingual situations. The multilingual popula­tions to be investigated are adult and child L2/L3 learners in situations of potential language attrition and loss as a result of learning an additional language (especially one that, due to migration, may become the dominant language of the speakers). While previous work has tended to focus on the effect of the previously acquired language(s) on a subsequently acquired language, the AcqCESS project will study bidirectional crosslinguistic influence; that is, also the effect of the new language on the previously acquired language(s).

Having to learn new languages is the current reality for millions of Ukrainian adults and children, who have been displaced (mainly) across Europe due to the catastrophic situation in their home country. The new languages to be learned are in some cases structurally very similar to their first language(s), e.g. Polish, but in other cases quite different, e.g. German or Norwegian. This means that this linguistic situation facilitates numerous compara­tive studies of how these languages may affect each other in the mind/brain of multilingual children, in both directions. It is also an opportunity to focus on an understudied Slavic language as well as bi- and multilingual language combina­tions that have not been available before.

Funding source: Centre for Advanced Study https://cas-nor.no