Brechje van Osch

Brechje van Osch is a Research Fellow at the Department of Language and Culture, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her work focuses on bilingual/multilingual populations, particularly heritage language acquisition. She investigates cross-linguistic influence, language input quality, and societal impacts of multilingualism. She is affiliated with the AcqVA Aurora and C-LaBL research groups, and leads the MSCA-funded HeLA project (2022–2024).

Her research emphasizes Spanish in contact with other languages, exploring how languages interact in the mind and society. Key topics include grammatical gender, code-switching, and L3 acquisition. She employs experimental methods combining offline/online measures to study language processing.

Notable contributions include studies on heritage Spanish in the Netherlands, Papiamento-Dutch code-switching, and Norwegian-English bilingual L3 learning. Her work critiques monolingual normativity in bilingual research and advocates for inclusive methodologies.

Current projects examine cross-linguistic influence in trilingual learners and the role of sociolinguistic variables in multilingual development. She collaborates internationally with institutions like John Benjamins Publishing and Frontiers in Psychology.