PhD candidate

Freya obtained an M.A. in Applied Linguistics (with a specialization in language acquisition and multilingualism) and an M.Ed. for German and English from the University of Münster. She is currently pursuing a joint PhD degree at LMU Munich and the University of Groningen under the supervision of Sarah Schimke (LMU) and Greg Poarch (RUG). Her research areas span psycholinguistics, cognitive effects of multilingualism, and cross-linguistic influences in multilingual language processing in both children and adults.

Project description

More than half of the world’s population speaks more than one language, but although languages typically seem to function independently from one another, research has shown that multilingual speakers cannot simply deactivate one language while using the other (Kroll et al., 2014). In her PhD project, Freya aims to further investigate the co-activation of languages in multilinguals and examines potential modulating factors. For this purpose, she has focused particularly on adolescent second language learners, a population that is rather underrepresented in previous research on language co-activation. In addition to behavioral methods, her research also draws on psychophysiological methods, such as pupillometry, which allow for mapping cognitive processes during linguistic processing.