In García González’ dissertation titled Multilingualism Across the Lifespan: Exploring Social and Cognitive Factors of Language Switching and Use, she investigates how cognitive and social factors influence speakers’ choice of language in both children and adults as well as how the Covid-19 pandemic influenced language dynamics in multilingual families. By combining different theoretical and methodological approaches and studying speakers with diverse ages and linguistic backgrounds, she aimed to create an increasingly holistic portrayal of multilingualism and of multilingual language users.
The research included the analysis of survey data with a sociolinguistic approach, and the collection of cognitive and linguistic experiment data following a psycholinguistic approach. The results of the survey study revealed that the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures had some positive effects in the language use of multilingual families in Norway, who experienced more time and opportunities to use the home or minority languages with their children. The studies that included psycholinguistic data exposed new insights in the associations between multilingual language use and cognition, which seem weaker when speakers have significant experience using and switching between languages on a daily basis.
All in all, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of multilingualism and cognition, where associations between the two seem less robust than previously assumed. Furthermore, this thesis sheds light on how certain environmental factors can have an impact on how, and how much, speakers use their languages.
Elisabet García Gonzalez successfully defended her dissertation on 19 January 2024.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: "Monolingual group comparison in research on bilingualism: Do we need it?"
Evaluation committee
- Professor Ludovica Serratrice, University of Reading (first opponent)
- Professor Marco Calabria, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Natalia Kartushina, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Unn Røyneland
Supervisors
- Professor Minna Lehtonen, University of Oslo
- Professor Julien Mayor, University of Oslo
- Professor Sible Andringa, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication