Kara Morgan-Short (University of Illinois)   

Kara Morgan-Short (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), with a joint appointment in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies and the Department of Psychology where she directs the Cognition of Second Language Acquisition Lab. Kara is also affiliated with the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at UIC, is currently co-editor of the Language Learning Cognitive Neuroscience Series, and serves on editorial boards. Informed by the fields of linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Kara Morgan-Short’s research aims to elucidate the linguistic and (neuro)cognitive processes underlying late-learned second language acquisition and use. Further, her research explores how these processes may be moderated by the effects or interactions of factors external to the learner, such as the context under which a second language is learned, and factors internal to the learner, such as learners’ level of proficiency or learners’ individual cognitive abilities (e.g., working memory, declarative/procedural memory, attention). These issues are examined using a set of complementary behavioral (e.g., accuracy on spoken language tasks) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials, ERPs) approaches. Results of her work have been published in such journals as Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, and Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

           Theres Grüter (University of Hawaii) 

Theres Grüter is a Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research investigates how language users of all kinds – adults and children, monolingual and bilingual - process and acquire structural aspects of language (aka grammar). Grüter particularly interested in how we integrate information from various linguistic (e.g., phonological, syntactic, semantic) and non-linguistic (e.g., event structure, visual information) sources, how we do so as quickly and successfully as we typically do in everyday communication, and how this ability develops over time in various language learners.

          Patrick Rebuschat (Lancaster University) 

Patrick Rebuschat is a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Lancaster University, where he also serves as Director of Internationalization at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

He is interested in the cognitive basis of language learning and processing, i.e. He studies how the mind and brain acquires and processes novel language(s). He is particularly interested in implicit learning, statistical learning, heritage language bilingualism, and second language acquisition.

He is also Distinguished International Professor at the LEAD Graduate School, University of Tübingen, and Director of the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), a strategic partnership that brings together six leading universities and the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He coordinates the NOVA Lancaster partnership on behalf of Lancaster University and the SLLAT Research Group within the Department of Linguistics and English Language. He also co-direct the Lancaster Language Learning Lab (4L).

          Bernadette O'Rourke (University of Glasgow) 

Bernadette O’Rourke research sits within the broad area of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language and focuses on the political and social meanings of language and their influence on society. She has specialisms in: 

  • Minority languages
  • Multilingualism
  • Language policy
  • Language ideologies

She is particularly interested in the dynamics of multilingual societies, language revitalization in minoritized languages, ethnography of resistance, language ideologies and language activism. She has examined these dynamics across a range of fieldwork sites and language contexts including Galician (northern Spain), Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Faroese. Since 2011, She have been examining the experiences of “new speakers” of minority languages (so-called “non-native” speakers who acquire a language outside of the home). In more recent years, she has extended this focus beyond minority language contexts, exploring theories around the sociolinguistics of the “speaker” across a range of multilingual strands in the context of migration and transnational mobilities.