Språkdag med C-LaBL ved Hellerud videregående skole, Oslo 

Background: Multilingualism has been linked to enhanced cognitive aging. This study investigated how the degree of multilingual engagement, quantified by Multilingual Language Diversity (MLD) scores, influences cognitive control and brain activity in older adults.
Methods: Using EEG, we examined 122 Norwegian-English bilinguals (ages 18-82) during a Flanker task. We assessed the impact of MLD on task-related neural activity (alpha band suppression) and behavioral performance (congruency effect).
Results: Higher MLD was associated with more efficient inhibitory control, reflected in smaller congruency effects and reduced alpha band suppression during the Flanker task.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that the degree of multilingual engagement may contribute to enhanced cognitive function in older adults by improving inhibitory control and optimizing neural processing.

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).
The study consists of six sessions. Session 1 assesses attention-related executive functions and language history. Session 2 begins with resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) to measure attentional skills, followed by training on gender agreement (present in Norwegian and Spanish). Sessions 3 and 4 introduce differential object marking (present in Spanish) and verb-object agreement (absent from all three languages), respectively. Each session includes vocabulary pre-training, grammar training, a behavioural test, and an EEG experiment measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to grammatical violations in a grammaticality judgement task. Session 5 reassesses cognitive measures, and Session 6, after four months, tests retention of all grammatical properties.
This presentation will focus on preliminary results with a methodological emphasis. We will first examine accuracy in the grammaticality judgements, which was generally high, before analysing a consistent P600-like effect associated with a control violation involving misplaced definite articles (e.g., thebook), relative to a grammatical condition (e.g., the book). This effect likely reflects increased attentional demands during syntactic processing. Notably, this control effect is observed across artificial languages, sessions and brain regions (with greater strength in medial and posterior regions), providing a reference point for evaluating the ERPs associated with the grammatical properties of interest. After demonstrating and discussing this comparison, forthcoming analyses will be outlined, and feedback will be welcome.

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.
In this talk, I will present the first results from a gender decision task. We tested 37 late unbalanced Polish-Danish bilinguals across varying proficiency levels and compared them to a baseline group of 38 Polish-German bilinguals, whose gender systems are symmetric and similar. The results suggested no effect of the Polish gender system on Danish, even for neuter gender, which is present in both languages. In contrast, Polish-German bilinguals showed clear lexical gender congruency effects influenced by their proficiency in German. Additionally, both groups struggled with neuter gender assignment. These findings suggest that in the bilingual mental lexicon, asymmetric and dissimilar gender systems are represented autonomously.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Linguistic distance profoundly influences how bilinguals process and represent language at various levels and, particularly, syntax. This talk explores how syntactic distance shapes bilingual cognition, drawing on evidence from French-English, Polish-English, Welsh-English, and Chinese-English bilinguals. French-English bilinguals have different uses for the present perfect and the passé composé—forms that are formally equivalent but functionally distinct— and they display separate syntactic representations for these constructions. Eye-tracking results reveal that grammatical violations in English sentences fail to elicit the expected reading time increases due to interference from passé composé, since literal translations in French would be correct (Skałba & Thierry, in prep). Welsh-English bilinguals exemplify how abstract syntactic rules transfer anomalously across languages. The Welsh soft mutation rule, absent in English, can affect how anomalous words of English are processed, depending on whether they follow Welsh mutation rules. This transfer occurs independently of phonological overlap (Vaughan-Evans et al., 2014). Furthermore, the canonical Adjective-Noun word order of English and Welsh can co-exist in the mind of Welsh-English bilinguals tested only in English as shown by variation of the variations of the N200 (Sanoudaki & Thierry, 2014; 2015). Chinese-English bilinguals showcase an extreme case of linguistic distance since grammatical tense does not exist in Mandarin Chinese. Despite explicit mastery of English tense rules, Chinese individuals fluent in English fail to process tense-conveyed temporal differences in real time, as shown by the absence of expected N400 modulations of event-related potentials (Li et al., 2018; 2023). Together, these findings reveal how linguistic distance modulates syntactic processing in bilinguals, influencing representations and transfer. This work may have broad implications for second-language acquisition, bilingual education, and our understanding of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals.

Artificial language experiments have long played a role in linguistics, shedding light on processes of first and second language learning, and how they may link to typology. A number of recent findings indeed suggest that linguistic patterns that are more common across languages are also easier to learn in the lab. For example, artificial language experiments investigating word order suggest that typologically common basic word orders, like Subject-Object-Verb, and nominal orders, like Noun-Adjective-Numeral-Demonstrative are preferred by adults in the lab. Experiments investigating perception of non-word sequences also suggests a preference for suffixing over prefixing, parallel to this well-known typological tendency. However, the goal of this kind of research is to identify cognitive or psychological *universals*, that is, biases or preferences that are shared by all humans, either independently of, or prior to their experience with a particular language. And yet, as in much research in the social sciences, populations tested often remain restricted. In this talk I survey recent results that aim to better achieve this goal by expanding the populations of participants tested in artificial language learning experiments. In some cases, this means targeting populations whose language experience actively goes against a typological trend--for example, speakers of a predominantly prefix language. This provides a particularly stringent test of the universality of the hypothesized cognitive universal. In other cases, this means simply expanding our sample to cover different kinds of populations, whose individual languages experience might impact their behaviour in different ways. In both cases, cross-linguistic experiments allow us to explore both how cognition can shape language *and* how language experience can shape cognition.

Grammatical gender is present in nearly half of the world's languages and often creates a parallel with our socio-biological sex reality. While this parallel is evident in cases of natural gender (e.g., in Spanish, "la enfermera" [female nurse, feminine] and "el enfermero" [male nurse, masculine]), it also extends to purely abstract gender (e.g., in Spanish, mesa [table] is feminine, but libro [book] is masculine). In this talk, I will present a project submitted to the MSCA program that explores the potential impact of our socio-biological sex reality on the processing of abstract grammatical gender across different languages. The project focuses on online language comprehension and analyzes the cognitive asymmetries between the gender values of a series of languages where the grammatical masculine/feminine dichotomy differs in how pronounced it is. These languages include Spanish (masculine/feminine), Norwegian in the written Nynorsk variant (masculine/feminine/neuter), and Norwegian in the written Bokmål variant (common/neuter). The impact of word-related stereotypes, the sex of the speaker, their gender roles and attitudes, and the gender system of the languages are included in the design of multiple gender categorization and lexical decision tasks.

Recent research highlights a need of deeper understanding of the nature of language competence and the development of this competence under heritage language bi- and multilingualism. Heritage speakers (HSs) is a population highly diverse in terms of their linguistic competence and its development. Multilingual Acquisition and Processing (MAP): Heritage Russian in Spain will provide an examination of Russian Heritage Language (HL) grammar in a previously unstudied socio-linguistic context focusing in particular on the patterns of cross-linguistic interaction at early and most unstable stages of multilingual language development. The overall research objective is to discover the patterns of language acquisition and language processing in order to find out how multilingual minds deploy their developing grammatical knowledge and how they detect and access the linguistic (morpho-syntactic) mechanisms from their two co-existing languages in real-time. The proposed empirical study will investigate the effects of linguistic proximity, individual experiential factors and the developmental patterns of cross-linguistic influence in child bilingualism. Heritage Russian in Spain will be studied with a focus on 3-7-year-old children in order to examine developmental trajectories in both languages. On the theoretical level, MAP will significantly contribute to the development of a model of heritage language grammar and add to a sub-field of multilingualism studies, Heritage Language Acquisition, by showing the patterns of cross-linguistic interaction at early stages of multilingual Russian-Spanish development. On a societal and education level, project findings will be relevant for policy makers, teachers, school principals and HSs communities in European countries. To date, most heritage language studies have focused exclusively on the minority language, MAP will fill an important gap by focusing on both languages.

In this talk, I will present my PhD research and outline my plans for the current project. My PhD work focused on 1st generation Indians living in Glasgow (Scotland) and explored how their native languages, Hindi and Indian English, were phonetically influenced by the host linguistic variety, Glaswegian English. Looking ahead, my current project shifts focus to 1st generation Indians living in Norway, learning Norwegian as their third language (L3). This research will investigate both their acquisition of Norwegian and potential attrition in their native Hindi and English due to increased exposure to and use of Norwegian.

This study investigates to what extent cross-linguistic influence from Norwegian and English affects adverb placement in L3 French and L3 Spanish in bilingual high school students. In Norwegian, adverb placement is determined by the type of verb, with main clauses requiring postverbal adverbs, and subordinate clauses requiring preverbal adverb. In English, while in Norwegian, the position of the adverb is determined by the type of verb: lexical verbs follow the adverb while copular verbs precede it. In French, adverbs follow the verb independent of clause type or verb type. In Spanish, both orders are always grammatical.
Our main research question is whether students are influenced more by the societal language Norwegian or by English, and whether CLI from the previously acquired languages obtains differently depending on the L3. Moreover, we examine the effects of extra-linguistic variables such as proficiency, exposure, use and age of onset of English, modulate the extent of the influence. We gathered data from 201 high school students between the ages of 11 and 15 from both regular and international schools in Norway, who study either French (N= 79) or Spanish (N=122) as a third language. The students carried out a digitalized fill-in-the-gap task in their respective L3, as well as in Norwegian and English. In addition, proficiency in all the languages was measured, and a background questionnaire was administered.
The data indicate predominantly CLI from Norwegian in L3 Spanish, and from both English and Norwegian in L3 French. Moreover, the degree of CLI is modulated by extra-linguistic variables. Finally, the results emphasize the need to carefully control for participants' knowledge of the relevant structures in both their previously acquired languages.

While present research on TLA focuses on the influence of L1 and/or L2 on L3, less attention has been given to the reversely occurring effect, in which the subsequently acquired L3 impacts the stability of the previous language systems. Therefore, this PhD project focuses on the extent to which the addition of an L3 can influence word order patterns in L2 and considers whether the robustness of the effect is modulated by L2/L3 proficiency and language balance. To address the above, I have conducted a cross-sectional study among L1 Polish L2 English learners acquiring L3 Norwegian (n=65), Swedish (n=52) or Danish (n=46) from beginning to advanced levels (A2-C1). To isolate the impact of the L3, a bilingual control group has also been recruited (L1 Polish L2 English, n=28). All participants were tested by means of an offline acceptability judgement task, an online self-paced reading task and an elicited oral production task in both L2 and L3. While the English experimental items reflecting the Scandinavian-like word order were aimed at capturing regressive influence, their Scandinavian counterparts ensured that the structures have been acquired. Proficiency in both L2 and L3 was additionally assessed through DIALANG and self-reports. In this presentation, I will focus on two structures that differentiate Mainland Scandinavian (L3) from English (L2) and Polish (L1), i.e., placement of verbs in main clauses (V2) and placement of particles with transitive verbs. The results suggest a co-existence of two seemingly contradictive patterns: one of direct rCLI from L3 to L2, where the L3 impacts the preference for one of the permitted orders, and one of indirect rCLI, where the L3 makes the learners more sensitive to errors in their L2. Therefore, I will propose that the difference in the observed patterns could be due to salience of the considered structures, explicitness of L3 instruction and the degree of grammar violation that the rCLI would induce.