PhD candidate

Sarah Stolle completed a BA in German Linguistics and Literature and holds an MA in Linguistics from the University of Freiburg (Germany). As a research assistant and intern, Sarah joined different projects on mono- and multilingual language processing during her studies and finally decided to do an ERP study on grammatical gender processing for her MA thesis, which she conducted at Leiden University (Netherlands). Since June 2023, Sarah is now a PhD fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB, Belgium), working under the supervision of Prof. Mathieu Declerck (VUB) and Prof. Esli Struys (VUB), with Prof. Merel Keijzer (University of Groningen, Netherlands) as her external supervisor. In her PhD project, Sarah investigates the influence of language control on second language acquisition. Her project is funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).

Project description

Sarah’s PhD project investigates the influence of language control on second language acquisition. Language control is the process responsible for mitigating cross-language interference in the multilingual mind. As such, multilingualism research has long recognised that language control is pivotal for multilingual language use. In contrast, its role during second language acquisition (SLA) and thus during the onset of multilingualism remains unclear. To address this gap, this project examines whether and how language control influences SLA. For a comprehensive insight into this link, we take both monolingual language learners as well as already established multilinguals into account and accompany them during the first stages of acquiring a new language. Moreover, as previous research suggests that there might be differences in the way learners acquire items and rules of an L2, our project considers both learning domains by testing L2 vocabulary and morphological learning. In this way, this project aims to open up new research avenues at the intersection of multilingualism and SLA research.