Background and experience
2016- Professor of linguistics at the Universitetet i Agder 2015-2016 Associate Professor Universitetet i Agder 2015-2021 Associated researcher, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, University of Oxford, UK 2011-2015 Postdoctoral research fellow, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, University of Oxford, UK 2010-2011 Postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Germany 2009-2010 Postdoctoral research fellow, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, University of Oxford, UK 2007-2008 Postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Linguistics, Universität Konstanz, Germany 2001-2007 Research assistant in the SFB-project 471 (Sonderforschungsbereich): ‘Variation und Entwicklung im Lexicon’ (Variation and change in the lexicon), Department of Linguistics, Universität Konstanz, Germany 1996-2001 Translator at the Allensbach Institute (Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach), Allensbach. Germany
Areas of responsibility
I am Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Agder. Together with Linda Wheeldon, I lead the Experimental Linguistics research group and the associated Experimental Linguistics Lab (ELL). I am also programme director for the Master’s programme in English.
Teaching
I teach courses in phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics and experimental linguistics on both the BA and MA levels. I supervise student projects on the BA, MA and PhD levels.
Research
My main area of research focuses on how language is represented in the brain and on the process of language comprehension. A key question I investigate is how we manage to understand language despite its variations. I am also very interested in how languages change over time, asking why they change and especially why an aspect of one language changes in a certain way while a closely related language changes in a different way - or not at all. Uncovering the factors that drive whether languages change or not tells us a lot about our language capacity. As a theoretical phonologist, I work with both psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods. Since arriving at UiA, I have also started to research language processing in bilingual speakers and to investigate what multilingualism means for the ageing process.