Early Career Scholar Speakers

Grammatical gender in a third language: The role of cross-linguistic influence and input factors

Despite the advances made in our understanding of L3 development and use, the question of how grammatical gender is acquired and processed in L3 remains open. 
In this talk, I focus on grammatical gender in the interlanguage of adult learners of L3 Swedish, an area which has not been explored so far. Based on different methods, including self-paced reading, acceptability judgment, and gender decision, I look at gender assignment, gender agreement in DPs, and possessive gender agreement in two groups of learners who speak the same L1, Polish, but have acquired different L2s, English or German. Differences between these languages regarding the realisation of gender not only provide an opportunity to explore cross-language interactions, but also enable us to gain insight into the acquisition and processing of asymmetric gender systems (binary versus tripartite distinction). 
I conclude that acquiring and processing of an L3 grammatical gender system are shaped by cross-linguistic influence from both previously acquired languages and by input factors, such as amount of exposure and frequency of lexical items in the input.

Aleksandra Olszewska obtained her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in ESOL and Bilingual Education from University of Florida, USA. She is a Fulbright scholar. Aleksandra starts her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo in August 2021. 
Aleksandra’s research interests encompass teacher education for immigrant and bilingual students, linguistic justice, humanizing research, and socially just pedagogies. Her work has been published in TESOL Quarterly, International Journal of Multilingualism, and Teaching in Higher Education. She has presented her research at conferences, including Language and Migration, Princeton University; National Association for Bilingual Education; and TESOL International.

Multilingual spaces of possibilities and becoming: Refugee-background students in Poland

As human mobility continues to transform the European demographic landscape, it also affects school population shifts and shapes linguistic practices. Despite a number of language-in-education rights guaranteed by law across the continent, double standards about linguistic diversity still prevail, and only certain multilingual practices are valued in Europe (Macedo et al., 2003; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981). With the rise of anti-immigrant narratives, language policies and practices continue to create opportunity gaps for refugee-background students (RBSs) (Shapiro et al., 2018). Guided by a framework of social justice, RefugeeCrit (Strekalova-Hughes et al., 2018), and a poststructuralist approach to language (García, 2009), this talk illuminates the voices and identities of four Chechen RBSs in a public school in Poland. It also describes how certain RBSs’ language identities and practices were affirmed in the school. Drawing upon decolonial, humanizing, and arts-based research approaches (Fine, 2017; Paris, 2011), including counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), the data included interviews, fieldnotes, I Am From poems, and language self-portraits (Prasad, 2014). This talk ends with a call for linguistically and pedagogically sustaining practices for RBSs. This work further highlights the importance of establishing an interdisciplinary space of multilingual possibilities for equitable education and research in the context of RBSs.

Vincent DeLuca received his PhD from the University of Reading (UK) in 2018. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham (UK) on an ESRC project examining effects of individual differences in bilingual experience on neurocognitive outcomes. He is now an associate professor in the Neurocognition of Bilingualism and co-director of the Psycholinguistics of Language Representation (PoLaR) lab in the AcqVa Aurora Centre at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway.
 

Much research over the past two decades shows that bilingualism affects brain structure, function, and potentially domain-general cognition. The specificity of these effects, however, has become the subject of significant debate in recent years, in large part due to variability of findings across studies. My research program takes the position that bilingual effects on neurocognition exist but are conditional. I specifically aim to test the hypothesis that specific experience-based factors (EBFs) variably affect neural activity and plasticity in brain regions and pathways implicated in language- and executive control. Herein I present results from a series of previous and ongoing studies showing a specificity of neural adaptation to different EBFs. These data suggest that the brain strives to be maximally effective and efficient in language processing and control, which in turn affects domain-general cognitive processes proportionally to degree of engagement in bilingual experiences. I also present a new theoretical framework by which we can predict the trajectory of several neurocognitive adaptations commensurate to various EBFs. I close with a discussion of potential future directions for research in the field. 

Cooperative language control: An exploration

In everyday life, bilingual speakers differentially distribute their languages with different people and in different interactional contexts. Some bilinguals typically keep their languages separate; others codeswitch and make use of more than one language opportunistically. Increasing evidence suggests that interactional effects on the trajectories and outcomes of bilingualism are influenced by the ways in which the two languages are engaged. In this talk, I present converging evidence using an array of complementary multidisciplinary methods demonstrating that codeswitching requires a broad attentional state in which language membership is minimized and resources from both languages are explored. To better understand bilingual language control and adaptive change, I propose an approach that exploits variability within and across bilingual speakers and interactional contexts of language use and illustrate how it can be applied to develop an international network for research on diverse bilingual populations. Overall, the emerging picture is complex but systematic, suggesting that the bilingual language system is dynamic and adaptive to the demands of distinct contexts of language use.