Projects
Population developments co-determine diffusional language change: a close-up view on West-Germanic languages KU Leuven
This project investigates the relation between urban population developments and morphological changes in three major West-Germanic languages, English, Dutch, German, from the beginning of Early Modernity to the end of Classical Modernity (1500-1900). The main hypothesis is that morphological simplification accelerates when urban populations grow. Put more succinctly: word structure becomes simpler when cities grow. The reason is that the ...
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 ...
Understanding mathematical development in children: the causal mechanisms of mathematical language and mathematical abilities KU Leuven
Mathematical competence positively affects school performance. Studies highlighted the effect of spatial skills on children's mathematical development. These spatial skills included nonlinguistic spatial representations (e.g. mental rotation). However, language has a spatial component as well (i.e. spatial language such as prepositions), and mathematical language (i.e. spatial and numerical terms) is a strong predictor of mathematical ...
The development of clause linking and complex sentences in the second language acquisition of Dutch and French. Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Auditory brainstem implantation and language development University of Antwerp
A Study into the effects of a blended professional development program on pre-primary teachers ' Language Stimulatin COmpetenceS (LASCOS) KU Leuven
The quality of language stimulating interactions in early childhood education (ECE) has an important impact on the academic language skills of young children, which in turn is a powerful predictor of learning success. Although research shows that high quality teacher-child interactions are crucial for academic language learning, paradoxically, a wide range of classroom interaction studies point to the relatively poor quality and low quantity ...
A study into the effects of a blended professional development program on pre-primary teachers' Language Stimulating COmpetenceS (LASCOS) Ghent University
The quality of language stimulating interactions in early childhood
education (ECE) has an important impact on the academic language
skills of young children, which in turn is a powerful predictor of learning
success. Although research shows that high quality teacher-child
interactions are crucial for academic language learning, paradoxically, a
wide range of classroom interaction studies ...
Extramural English and young learners' development of implicit and explicit second language knowledge. KU Leuven
Recently, a growing number of studies have shown the potential of extramural English (= out-of-school engagement with English) for language learning. However, most of these studies have used explicit measures of L2 knowledge, such as multiple choice vocabulary tests and untimed grammaticality judgements. The present proposal aims to advance our understanding of the input-acquisition relationship by investigating the mechanisms underlying ...
Development of shared syntactic representations in second language acquisition. Ghent University
Our project investigates the acquisition of syntactic representations in a second language. We test a theory that proposes a process of increasing syntactic abstraction both within and between languages (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2016). We therefore follow subjects during 10 weeks as they learn an artificial learning; we use cross-linguistic structural priming to test the degree of abstraction across languages.