Research projects

Ongoing projects

Mutual understanding of closely related varieties in children

Anja Schüppert's PhD project

This project investigates to which extent Swedish and Danish speaking children understand their neighbour languages. In adults, most researchers have observed a comprehension asymmetry: Danes understand more Swedish than vice versa. In order to understand why this is the case, data is elicited from Danish and Swedish pre-schoolers. This gives us an opportunity to exclude the effect of subjects' orthographic knowledge when listening to a neighbour language. In addition, all children are tested for attitudes towards their own dialect, foreign dialects of their native language, and the neighbour language tested, in order to prevent influence of attitudes on their performance.

Publications

Schüppert, Anja and Charlotte Gooskens. In press. The role of extra-linguistic factors for receptive bilingualism: Evidence from Danish and Swedish pre-schoolers. International Journal of Bilingualism.

Schüppert, Anja and Charlotte Gooskens. 2011. Investigating the role of language attitudes for perception abilities using reaction time. Dialectologia.Special Issue II, pp. 119-140.