Marit Westergaard

Marit Westergaard is a Professor of English Linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, affiliated with the Department of Language and Culture within the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education. She also serves as Secretary General of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Her research focuses on multilingualism, bilingualism, and language acquisition, with special emphasis on syntactic variation, grammatical gender, and heritage languages. She leads the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL), funded by the Trond Mohn Foundation, which explores multilingualism through experimental methods like eye-tracking and EEG/ERP.

Key projects include AcqVA (Acquisition, Variation & Attrition), the Psycholinguistics of Language Representation (PoLaR) lab, and international networks such as MultiGender and MuMin. She develops theoretical frameworks like the Micro-cue Model and Linguistic Proximity Model, explaining language acquisition and cross-linguistic influence. Her work engages with Norwegian dialects, Russian, German, and English, addressing topics like word order variation, attrition, and diachronic change. She collaborates with Bilingualism Matters to provide evidence-based advice for multilingual families through the initiative "Flere språk til flere."

Recent research highlights include investigating CLI in L3 acquisition, syntactic variation in heritage languages, and the role of structural similarity in bilingual cognition. She supervises interdisciplinary projects funded by the RCN and EU, contributing to both theoretical and applied linguistics domains.