Our team in Tromsø

Principal Investigator

Marit Westergaard is Director of the AcqVA Aurora Center and the AcqVA Aurora Lab. Her work spans L1/L2/L3 and bilingual acquisition, heritage languages and language attrition, multilingualism, micro-variation, comparative syntax, and diachronic change, focusing on word order as well as various DP phenomena. She has published widely on all of these topics in leading journals in the field.

Post-docs

Isabel Nadine Jensen is a post-doctoral researcher at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. Her main interests are crosslinguistic influence in third language acquisition, focusing on the acquisition of morphosyntax, second language acquisition and artificial language learning.

Chloe Castle is a post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Language and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Chloe’s research interests include multilingualism, language acquisition, heritage languages, and language change. She is interested in taking a combined psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approach to examining these research areas. Her current research as part of the ADIM project focuses on morphosyntactic crosslinguistic influence in L3 and Ln acquisition.

Co-investigators

Merete Anderssen is a Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Language and Culture at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests include first, second, third and multilingual acquisition, and language attrition/heritage languages. Merete has worked on a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, including DP structure and structures exhibiting word order variation.

Yulia Rodina is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Language and Culture at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests focus on first, second, and third language acquisition as well as multilingualism and language change. She has conducted research on Russian, Norwegian, English, and Bosnian using production, comprehension and processing techniques.

Natalia Mitrofanova is a University Lecturer at the Department of Language and Culture at UiT – the Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests include first, second and third language acquisition, heritage languages, and language processing by monolinguals and multilinguals. In her research Natalia has used a variety of experimental paradigms ranging from acceptability judgements to self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments.

Anna Kamenetski is a Postdoctoral Fellow at UiT – the Arctic University of Norway (Multilingualism Research Center). Her research interests include verb semantics, language typology and multilingualism. In her work, she has used a variety of experimental methods, e.g., she has recently employed the event-related brain potentials to investigate attention to motion events in Turkish–Dutch early bilinguals.