Research subject The bilingual individual
In research on the bilingual individual, bi-/multilingualism is studied primarily as a cognitive phenomenon, both in informal language acquisition in authentic language environments and in formal language learning in classrooms.
Key issues concern language development, use, perception, processing and loss in both early multilingual children and adult language learners. The focus is on all linguistic levels – phonetic and phonological, morphological and lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – as well as on both spoken, written, and signed language.
Common questions concern universal features of learner language, influences from other languages (especially the first language), and effects of individual differences in learning age, language aptitude, motivation, and memory capacity. The research is partly anchored in the research field Second Language Acquisition (SLA), which in turn draws theoretical and methodological inspiration from, e.g., general linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and classroom-oriented learning research.
Experimental methods are often used, where data comes from language testing or brain imaging, but there are also longitudinal case studies, as well as corpus-based research, where data consists of learners' spontaneous or elicited language production.
Related research subject
BilingualismOn this page
Researchers
Niclas Abrahamsson
Professor
José Alemán Bañón
Universitetslektor
Tatiana Antontchik
Administrativ studierektor, Doktorand
Emanuel Bylund Spångberg
Professor
Kenneth Hyltenstam
Professor emeritus
Caroline Kerfoot
Professor
Gunnar Norrman
Universitetslektor
Marta Quevedo Rodriguez
Doktorand
Susan Sayehli
Universitetslektor
Klara Skogmyr Marian
Universitetslektor
Maryann Su Lin Tan
Doktorand
Research group
Departments and centres
Research is conducted at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at the Department of Swedish Language an Multilingualism (Svefler).
The Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism