Projects
Measuring linguistic attitudes with auditory affective priming: Attitudinal variation towards varieties of Dutch KU Leuven
The objective of this work is twofold. It sets out to contribute to the study of language attitudes on a methodological as well as a descriptive level. The main goal of the study is the methodological one. Notwithstanding some exceptions (e.g. Preston 1982), quantitative language attitude research has known little methodological innovation since the introduction of the matched-guise technique in the 1960s (Lambert et al. 1960). This relative ...
Finish your plate and clean up your language! A mixed methods approach to Colloquial Belgian Dutch and Standard Dutch variation in child-directed speech at Flemish dinner table conversations. KU Leuven
This project studies variation in the way parents address their children, focusing on parents’ selection of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (‘tussentaal’, e.g. gij ‘you’) or Standard Belgian Dutch forms (e.g. jij ‘you’).
Through structured variation between standard and vernacular, parents implicitly teach their children which language features (and varieties) to use in which context, hence at the same time revealing which language features ...
The development of socially meaningful language variation in (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome KU Leuven
This project studies the development of the social meaning of linguistic variation in (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS), given their unique developmental profile with strengths in social functioning and challenges with linguistic processing. The system for pronouns of address in Belgian Dutch displays two dimensions of socially meaningful variation (T/V and standard/colloquial) and serves as a case study. The key innovations are the ...
Acquiring social meaning of language variation: an experimental exploration KU Leuven
Language varies in many different ways. People for instance use different words to refer to the same object or they pronounce words in various ways. Listeners often associate this language variation with presumed social attributes of the speaker (e.g. level of education). This is referred to as the social meaning of language variation. This project studies how people learn this type of sociolinguistic meaning. More concretely, the project ...
Linguistic and cultural education in Western Christianity, from c. 380 until 735: A study of the content, form, and sociocultural insertion of Latin language manuals KU Leuven
This postdoctoral research project aims to improve our understanding of the linguistic and cultural foundations for education in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. In order to do so, it will focus on the corpus of Latin language manuals (grammatical, lexicographical and orthographical works) produced during the period between the manuals of Augustine (c. 380) and Bede (d. 735). The project is based on the hypothesis that ...
Pain in Ancient Hebrew: Language, Cognition, and Culture KU Leuven
By combining several linguistic disciplines and theories (i.e., cultural linguistics, frame semantics, conceptual metaphor theory, and cultural scripts theory), this research will provide the very first comprehensive analysis of the verbal expressions of pain in ancient Hebrew, and its underlying conceptualizations, cultural norms and assumptions from prior to the 2nd century CE. The ancient Hebrew language of pain has never been thoroughly ...
On the ontological status of the linguistic system: An empirical study on coherence in spoken Surinamese and Belgian Dutch Ghent University
In linguistic research, opinions vary on how language variation functions and how it is structured. One vision emphasises that free variation does not exist, that language variation is structured along parameters such as speech setting or the social profile of the language user, making it possible to distinguish linguistic systems such as standard languages or sociolects. In another vision however, it is argued that there is less structure ...
Do small words make a difference? Investigating the effects of gender-neutral pronouns on mental gender representations and perceptions of text quality in Dutch, French and Norwegian Ghent University
Although gender-neutral 3rd person pronouns (3PPs) are increasingly appearing in media discourse, studies of how readers interpret and evaluate them are currently still scarce. This project therefore aims at conducting a series of experimental studies in three languages in which gender-neutral 3PPs have recently been introduced, viz. Dutch, French and Norwegian. We will investigate three possible uses of gender-neutral 3PPs in these three ...
Children’s social evaluations of English elements in Dutch: an experimental approach Vrije Universiteit Brussel
This project inquires into the emergence of children’s language attitudes by pinpointing the development of three components of social evaluation attested in adults: dimensionality, predictable variability, and automaticity. To this end, ...