Line Burholt Kristensen

Line Burholt Kristensen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Humanities. She leads the research group "Broken Grammar & Beyond," financed by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, and serves as Principal Investigator for the Steno Diabetes Center Sjælland-funded project "Vulnerability and related notions - an investigation of language to and about individuals with diabetes" with co-PI Christina Fogtmann Fosgerau.

Her educational background includes an MA in linguistics, PhD, and completion of the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Programme at the University of Copenhagen (2013-2014). Her academic career spans positions as Associate Professor (2018-present), Postdoc at the ProGram research group (2013-2017), External lecturer (2012-2013), and PhD student (2009-2012).

Kristensen's research integrates psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and experimental methodologies to investigate grammatical processing. Her primary focus examines how native speakers process texts with anomalous learner syntax, particularly verb placement errors in Danish as a second language. She employs eye-tracking technology to measure reading times and comprehension, comparing grammatical anomalies in native versus non-native Danish writing. Her work on information structure and sentence context builds on her 2013 PhD thesis "Context, you need," which investigated how these elements interact during sentence processing.

Her recent publications reveal a strong trajectory in second language acquisition research, with particular emphasis on verb-second constructions in Danish, preposition usage, and error detection mechanisms. These studies combine corpus linguistic approaches with experimental methods, demonstrating how language users react to grammatical anomalies both cognitively and neurologically. Her work increasingly bridges theoretical linguistics with practical applications for language teaching.

As an educator, Kristensen teaches at BA and MA levels in Linguistics and has previously instructed courses in Audiologopedics, Danish, and IT & Cognition. She actively supervises student projects in experimental linguistics and corpus linguistics, encouraging research on language processing and acquisition. Her grant portfolio includes substantial funding from the Independent Research Fund Denmark and Steno Diabetes Center Sjælland for interdisciplinary projects examining language in both educational and medical contexts.

She directs the "Broken Grammar & Beyond" research group, which employs a multidisciplinary approach combining psycho- and neurolinguistic experiments with grammar research. The team investigates the neural underpinnings of language processing using neuroimaging techniques while analyzing naturally occurring grammatical anomalies in both native and non-native Danish writing. This work has significant implications for understanding language acquisition, processing limitations, and the cognitive architecture of grammar.