Last week we organised the second workshop of our project titled “Using diversity in multilingual experience as a model to study neural plasticity”, funded by the Norwegian Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) Young Investigator Grant, and hosted by the Arctic University of Norway in Tromso. In two and a half days full of insightful conversations with prominent experts as guest speakers, we revisited themes that are very relevant but perhaps understudied in the study of bilingualism as a neuroplastic experience. This included topics related to linguistic distance and attitudes towards bilingualism (led by Marco Tambourelli, Bangor University, UK), the underlying mechanisms of language learning, including statistical learning (led by Patrick Rebuschat, University of Lancaster, UK), and the individual and social factors that affect bilingual language development (led by Ewa Haman, University of Warsaw, Poland).
The project is led by Dr Vincent DeLuca (University of Tromso, Norway), with Gigi Luk (McGill University, Canada), Merel Keijzer (University of Groningen, Netherlands), Zofia Wodniecka (Jagiellonian University, Poland) and Christos Pliatsikas (University of Reading, UK) as Co-Is. The first workshop of this project took place in October 2024 in Oslo. We look forward to the third workshop, this time on advanced methods on theory building and data collection an analyses, scheduled for August 2026 in Oslo!