Linda Ruth Wheeldon

Linda Ruth Wheeldon is a Professor of Experimental Linguistics at the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation, University of Agder, Norway. She leads the university's experimental linguistics research group and serves as PhD specialization leader for linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities and Education. Her academic journey includes positions at the University of Birmingham (Reader in Psycholinguistics, 2011; Associate Professor, 2000) and postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

• PhD in Experimental Psycholinguistics (University of Cambridge, 1989)
• MSc in Psychology and Linguistics (University of Edinburgh, 1985)

Research Focus: Her work bridges experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, investigating language structure representation and its influence on comprehension/production. Current research examines how bilingualism and physical fitness mitigate age-related language decline. Methodologically, she employs reaction time studies, eye-tracking, and EEG/MEG neuroimaging to analyze sentence production, phonological representations, and morphological processing.

Publications & Collaborations: With over 85 publications and 3,124 citations, her recent work explores bilingualism's impact on attention networks, fitness interventions for language comprehension, and neural mechanisms of syntactic binding. Collaborators include Sam Lucas (University of Birmingham) and Katrien Segaert (University of Birmingham).

• British Academy grant recipient
• Leverhulme Trust Fellow

Laboratory: Leads the Experimental Linguistics Lab (ELL) at UiA, focusing on bilingual processing, aging, and cognitive-linguistic interactions.