In most studies on gender processing, native speakers of the same language are treated as a homogeneous group. The current study investigates to what extent an ongoing change in the gender system of Norwegian (a development from three to two genders, involving the loss of feminine) may be refected in processing. We carried out a gender decision task in which speakers were presented with 32 nouns ...

I would first of all like to thank the many authors who have provided commentaries on my keynote article ‘Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition’ (Westergaard, 2021a). The keynote has generated significant and stimulating debate about central issues on crosslinguistic influence in multilingual language acquisition, and I find it especially welcome ...

Cervantes, en <i>Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda</i>, emplea dinámicamente memoria e <i>imaginatio</i> y moderniza el género, por medio del uso de la <i>imitatio compuesta</i>. El agua, que en el Persiles adopta, entre otras, la forma del ‘mar’, los ‘ríos’, pero también del ‘hielo’, <i>vincula</i> las diversas aventuras que se suceden, así como el fluir narrativo, memorístico e imaginario, ...

Although the fourth of Quevedo’s Dreams and Discourses (Sueños y discursos), The World from Within (El mundo por de dentro), has been characterized as one of his most ‘skeptical’ texts, few critics have explored how skepticism functions in the text. Based on my doctoral research that takes into account recent revisions of Renaissance skepticism as a ‘multi-purpose tool’ and examines the text as a ...

Depicting the narrator’s repeated travels to the northwestern coast of Greenland, Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven aims to portray the landscapes of Greenland in a way that frees them from the constraints of the visual ideology associated with Western culture’s idea of landscape. This, however, is no easy task in a natural environment dominated by wide and grand views that seem to invite the detached ...

Based on both historical and present-day examples, this chapter discusses the connection between language acquisition and language change, focusing on generative approaches such as the cue-based theory of acquisition and change and grammar competition models. A number of problems are pointed out, mainly related to the generally target-consistent nature of first language acquisition and children’s ...

This study examines the role of language dominance (LD) on linguistic competence outcomes in two types of early bilinguals: (i) child L2 learners of Catalan (L1 Spanish-L2 Catalan and, (ii) child Spanish L2 learners (L1 Catalan-L2 Spanish). Most child L2 studies typically focus on the development of the languages during childhood and either focus on L1 development or L2 development. Typically, these ...

The Kven language that is spoken in northernmost Norway was officially recognized as a language in 2005. The history of the language community dates back to the sixteenth century according to tax books. There is still an ongoing discussion among certain language users, whether Kven is in fact a language or one of the Finnish dialects. The language planning of Kven has started in 2007 by ...

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question was a process initiated and lead by the authorities in ...