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 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.

Grammatikk, syntaks, morfologi, syntaktisk variasjon, nordiske språk og dialektar, språkleg variasjon, fleirspråklegheit, bidialektisme, språktileigning, kognitiv utvikling, språkhaldningar

Jeg forsker på forskjellige aspekter ved andre- og tredjespråkstilegnelse, det vil si innlæring av språk etter tidlig barndom. Jeg er interessert i både teoretiske og anvendte sider av språktilegnelse. Jeg er spesielt interessert i hvordan språkene påvirker hverandre hos flerspråklige og i forholdet mellom eksplisitt og implisitt læring. Jeg er også opptatt av flerspråklighet i vid forstand, og av flerspråklighet og språkinnlæring i skolen.

Research interests: Comparative grammar, multilingualism, heritage languages, acquisition, language change, grammatical gender, architecture of grammar, history of linguistics, philosophy of language,  theory of science, varieties of Norwegian, English

See the English version for more details.

 Min forskning fokuserer primært på hvordan ulike aspekter av flerspråklighet påvirker hjernen og de tilknyttede kognitive prosessene, spesielt arbeidsminne. Jeg undersøker hvordan disse kognitive tilpasningene dynamisk endres over tid og med endringer i språkmønstre, ved hjelp av psykolingvistiske eksperimenter og EEG.

• language acquisition (first, second, third, bilingual),
• multilingualism and education
• second language acquisition and language pedagogy
• nominal structure (grammatical gender, declension, definiteness)
• word order
• language variation and change
• predictive processing
• cross-linguistic influence
• English, Norwegian, Russian, BCMS

Forskningsprosjekter

• Multilingual Acquisition and Processing: Heritage Russian in Spain (MAP), Anastasiia Ogneva - Arctic MSCA fellow
• MultiLingual Minds and Factors Affecting MultiLingual Outcomes (Theme1, AcqVA Aurora Center)
• Across-domain Investigations in Multilingualism: Modeling L3 Acquisition in Diverse Settings (ADIM) (completed)
• Cross-linguistic influence in multilingualism across domains: phonology and syntax (CLIMAD) (completed)
• Micro-variation in Multilingual acquisition & attrition Situations (MiMS) (completed)
• MultiGender: A Multilingual Approach to Grammatical Gender (completed)
• Knowledge of grammatical gender in L2 speakers of Norwegian using eyetracking and other controlled experiments (completed)

Syntaks og grensesnittene med form (morfologi-fonologi) og betydning (semantikk); språkvitenskapelig teori.

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 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:

1.  Language separation in bidialectal speakers: evidence from eye tracking - (With Øystein Vangsnes. Recently submitted article about gender processing, grammar separation and language change.)

2. 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!)

3. 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.) 

4. 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) 

5. 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.

1. 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 .

2. Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English (Article in Glossa, 2016, with Tungseth, Corley, Sorace and Ramchand)

3. 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.

1. 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.)
2. 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)
3. 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:

1. Mer om de preverbala adverbialens syntax, semantik och prosodi (2018, article in Norsk lingvistisk tidskrift about V3 in Swedish triggered by preverbal adverbs)
2. 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. 

1. The role of tense-copying and syncretism in the licesing of morphological passives in the Nordic languages (2015, Studia Linguistica)
2. The category of participles (2013, in chapter in Categorization and category change, which summarises my views on participles and nominalizations) 
3. Double object passives, pseudo-passives and the complete loss of Case in Swedish (Extended handout from LAGB workshop on Double objects, 2015)
4. Noun-verb conversion without a generative lexicon (2009, in Nordlyd special issue on Nanosyntax).
5. 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.

1. Objects as locations in English and Mainland Scandinavian (with Gillian Ramchand, article in Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 2013) 

2. Localizing cross-linguistic variation in Tense systems: On telicity and stativity in Swedish and English (2012, in Nordic Journal of Linguistics, fulltext here)

3. Contact, Animacy, and Affectedness in Germanic (2012, with Gillian Ramchand, in Comparative Germanic Syntax: the state of the art, fulltext here)

    

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.

Phonology, Optimality Theory, microvariation

My research focuses on the neural and cognitive consequences of bilingualism and how these lead to the prevention and mitigation of cognitive aging.

• kognitiv psykologi og nevrovitenskap
• psykolingvistikk
• flerspråklighet
• semantisk / konseptuell behandling
• åpen vitenskap
• forskningsmetoder

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?

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

Forskningsinteresser:

Mine forskningsinteresser inkludererer sammenlignende språkvitenskap, syntaks, pragmatikk og informasjonsstruktur, nordiske dialekter, barnespråk, første- og andrespråktilegnelse, flerspråklighet, språkrevitalisering, norsk, norske dialekter, nordiske språk, samiske språk og engelsk.

Jeg har bakgrunn fra teoretisk syntaks, spesielt forholdet mellom syntaks og informasjonsstruktur. I doktorgraden min (2007) undersøkte jeg ordstillingsvariasjon i nordnorske dialekter, i sammenligning med andre skandinaviske språk/dialekter. Avhandlinga mi inkluderer også et kapittel om førstespråkstilegnelse av ordstillingsmønstre underordnede setninger på nordnorsk.

Etter doktorgraden har jeg fortsatt å forske på teoretisk syntaks og informasjonsstruktur, og på språktilegnelse.

Jeg har også kommet tilbake til et tema jeg jobbet med i mastergraden min (2000), nemlig språktilegnelse hos flerspråklige barn, og tverrspråklig påvirkning.

Et annet forskningsfelt som jeg har begynt å jobbe med i senere år omhandler samiske språk, og da spesielt nordsamisk og språktilegnelse hos samiskspråklige barn. Fra 2011-2017 ledet jeg prosjektet DASAGO (Davvisámigiel mánáid giellaovdáneapmi – North Sami child language acquisition), finansiert av Forskningsrådet. I dette prosjektet jobbet vi blant annet med å utvikle en tilpasning av MacArthur-Bates CDI (Communicative Development Inventory) til nordsamisk, samt at vi samlet inn et barnespråkskorpus av nordsamisktalende barn. Vi undersøkte også ulike grammatiske fenomener i samisk (barne)språk med utgangspunkt i dette korpuset. Vi jobber fortsatt med materiale som ble samlet inn i forbindelse med dette prosjektet.

Til sist har jeg nå begynt å sette meg inn i et tema som jeg lenge har vært interessert i, nemlig språkvansker. Jeg holder for tida på med en mastergrad i logopedi, og håper å forske på denne tematikken i fremtida.

For tida jobber jeg med blant annet:

• Object shift/Objektsveksling i norsk og andre skandinaviske språk, både i voksenspråk og i barnespråk
• OV/VO-veksling i nordsamisk, både i voksenspråk og i barnespråk
• Første- og andrespråkstilegnelse av ordstillingsvariasjon og informasjonsstruktur
• Flerspråklig språktilegnelse (norsk/engelsk, norsk/nordsamisk) og tverrspråklig påvirkning
• Tilegnelse av nordsamisk i et språkrevitaliseringsperspektiv

Jeg er involvert i følgende eksterne prosjekter:

• Ekstern ekspertkonsulent i prosjektet The development of Object Shift in North Germanic Child Language, ledet av Filippa Lindahl (Vest Universitet, Sverige)
• SamBa – Growing up in the Arctic. A longitudinal study of early childhood development and health in indigenous and non-indigenous children, ledet av Siv Kvernmo (Institutt for klinisk medisin, UiT)