معرفی
Eva Fernandez-Berkes is a Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland specializing in linguistics with a focus on multilingual language acquisition and syntactic development. Her research primarily examines how multilingual learners develop grammatical knowledge across multiple languages, with particular attention to syntactic structures like relative clauses and wh-movement across different language constellations including Hungarian-German-English and Hungarian-Spanish-English speaker groups.
Dr. Fernandez-Berkes' research interests center on multilingualism and language acquisition, particularly how knowledge from previously learned languages influences the acquisition of subsequent languages. She has made significant contributions to the Cumulative Enhancement Model (CEM), which proposes that syntactic knowledge accumulates and enhances with each additional language learned. Her work demonstrates that syntactic development in multilingual acquisition follows principled patterns rather than random transfer, showing that learners' prior linguistic experience selectively enhances their ability to acquire complex syntactic structures in new languages. She has extensively examined specific syntactic phenomena including relative clauses, null anaphora, and wh-movement through elicited production and imitation tasks.
Analysis of her publication record from 2012-2023 reveals consistent theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding multilingual syntactic development. Her research demonstrates that syntactic knowledge acquired in previous language learning has a multiplying rather than simply additive effect on subsequent language acquisition. The Cumulative Enhancement Model emerges as a unifying framework across her work, challenging traditional views of language transfer by demonstrating that multilingual development is a principled process where learners selectively integrate linguistic knowledge from across their language constellation.
Dr. Fernandez-Berkes has collaborated extensively with Suzanne Flynn on nearly all her publications, indicating a strong and sustained research partnership in the field of multilingual language acquisition. Her work has appeared in reputable academic venues published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, John Benjamins, Springer, and Cambridge University Press, with some publications receiving over 700 citations. While specific grant information isn't provided in the available materials, her sustained research output suggests active funding support for her work in language acquisition.
