Micro-variation in Multilingual Situations (MiMS)

In today's globalized reality, it is becoming increasingly common to acquire multiple languages across the lifespan. This new multilingualism provides considerable challenges and opportunities, and so far, very little research has been done on multilingual situations in Norway, especially from a formal linguistic perspective. The MiMS project (Micro-variation in Multilingual acquisition & attrition Situations) carries out research on language acquisition and multilingualism mainly among children and teenagers in heritage language situations, where a heritage language is defined as a language that is acquired naturalistically in the home, but which is not the majority language of the larger community/society. The project also investigates possible consequences for previously acquired languages (loss or attrition). The project is divided into four work packages, focusing on the following language combinations and populations: 1) Norwegian-Russian bilingual children in Norway, 2) German-Russian bilingual children in Germany, 3) Norwegian-English bilingual children in Norway and Americans who speak Norwegian as a heritage language, and 4) third language acquisition, mainly Norwegian-Russian and German-Russian bilinguals learning English as an L3. The focus is on grammatical properties such as word order, definiteness and grammatical gender. The project is carried out within a theoretical model originally developed for first language acquisition, the Micro-cue Model (Westergaard 2009, 2014), which argues that our language learning mechanism is not a system that makes major generalizations (which has been a common approach within generative child language acquisition over the last 20-30 years), but one that is sensitive to fine and very complex linguistic distinctions (micro-cues) from early on. In the MiMS project, this model is extended to multilingual situations, and the project thus contributes to theory development within general linguistics, language acquisition, and multilingualism. Finally, the project also provides new knowledge about the languages involved, more specifically which properties are vulnerable in multilingual situations and which factors are important in this respect, such as input frequency, linguistic complexity, and cross-linguistic effects. Recently, the MiMS project has focused on third language (L3) acquisition, with several studies on German-Russian and Norwegian-Russian bilinguals learning English as an L3 as well as Norwegian-English bilinguals learning either German or an artificial language as an L3. One of our main research questions is whether crosslinguistic influence in L3 contexts can be from both of the previously acquired languages or whether there is a single source of transfer, and if so, what factors are involved in the choice of language, e.g. lexical or structural similarity or order of acquisition (L1 vs. L2). The experiments include structures where the L3 is similar to one of the languages and different from the other. In a recent study that has just been published in International Journal of Bilingualism (Kolb et al. 2022), we study German-Russian bilingual children learning English as an L3. This is a large study, focusing on four different properties that have previously been found to be problematic in L2 acquisition of English. Our findings show that, compared to two groups of L2 learners of English (with either Russian or German as their L1), the performance of the L3 learners indicates that there is influence of both German and Russian on their L3 English, and furthermore, that this influence can be both facilitative and non-facilitative. This provides support for a theoretical model of L3 acquisition that has been (further) developed as part of the MiMS project, the Linguistic Proximity Model. As Norwegian and European classrooms are becoming increasingly multilingual, our research results are also relevant and useful for the field of education.

According to the project proposal, the main objectives were to "make important contributions to current research in the fields of language acquisition, multilingualism and theoretical linguistics." The MiMS project was also expected to "provide new knowledge ... to ... public administrators, teachers, politicians, as well as multilingual adults and children." The impact on the scientific community is mainly seen in three fields, 1) the acquisition of gender, 2) Norwegian as a heritage language, and 3) the development of a new model of multilingual language acquisition (Linguistic Proximity Model). The MiMS project has also been active in communicating research-based information to a general audience, mainly through the service Flere språk til flere. The project has also had great importance for the scholars involved, in that it has contributed to permanent academic positions and further grants (from the RCN, EU commission, Centre for Advanced Study, and UiT Aurora Centres).

Children clearly learn language from the ambient input, but not from input alone. One of the main questions in theoretical linguistics and language acquisition is how much is provided by an innate endowment and how much must be learned from the primary linguistic data. The MiMAS project addresses this central issue by testing a new theoretical approach to language acquisition and attrition, the micro-cue model developed by the PI in recent years, based on data from monolingual acquisition. The MiMAS project will extend this novel approach to multilingual situations, and new data will be collected from several populations of bi- and multilingual children and adults, e.g. German-Russian bilingual children, Norwegian-American heritage speakers, and bilingual children learning English as an L3. Organized into four interrelated work packages, the project focuses on (morpho-)syntactic micro-variation related to word order and certain aspects of nominal structure in Norwegian, Russian, German and English. These languages are chosen as they represent a variety of challenges with respect to this micro-variation, both for children acquiring and adults maintaining these systems in multilingual contexts. By identifying small steps in these processes (micro-cues), the project will increase our understanding of the human language faculty. It will also investigate the effect of more general factors such as complexity, frequency and economy in the acquisition and attrition processes. While monolingual acquisition typically takes place too fast for linguists to detect small steps in development, bilingual acquisition is often slightly slower. Multilingual acquisition and attrition thus constitute exceptionally promising areas of research to identify micro-cues. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that cross-linguistic influence will affect minor parts of the grammar, as according to recent work in second language acquisition theory, only small and simple rules can be transferred.