Marianne Gullberg

Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes in Languages and Cognitive Science, SCAS

Professor of Psycholinguistics, and Chair/Director, Lund University Humanities Lab, and of the national research infrastructure HUMINFRA

Photo of Marianne Gullberg

Photo: Johan Wahlgren

Marianne Gullberg received her PhD in General Linguistics from Lund University in 1998. Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, (2000-02), she headed the group The Dynamics of Multilingual Processing (with P. Indefrey) (2003-09) at the same institute, and co-founded the Nijmegen Gesture Centre (with A. Özyürek), the first such centre of its kind. In 2010, she became Professor of Psycholinguistics at Lund University and Head of Department/Director of Lund University Humanities Lab, a university-wide research infrastructure. She also heads HUMINFRA, a Swedish national research infrastructure for the Humanities, funded by the Swedish Research Council and the partner organisations 2022-2028.

Gullberg’s research examines language acquisition and real-time language use in adult multilingual speakers, targeting semantics, discourse, and gesture production and comprehension. She was a Wallenberg Scholar 2013-2023, and currently holds several grants, including a including a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Programme grant, Transdisciplinary Approaches to Learning, Acquisition and Multlingualism (TEAM) 2024-2029. Her work in the programme focuses on how exposure and use of a new language in different social settings affect language development. Although based in linguistics, her work is inherently interdisciplinary. She probes these issues using methods ranging from multimodal analyses to neurocognitive methods across many languages including sign language.

Gullberg has published widely on these topics. Her publications include special issues of journals and volumes such as Gestures and Second Language Acquisition (IRAL, Mouton, 2006), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Second Language Acquisition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), Gestures in Language Development (Benjamins, 2010), The Earliest Stages of Language Learning (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance (Benjamins, 2014), Visual Language (Frontiers, 2019), and Input in Study Abroad and Views from Acquisition (Second Language Research, 2023). She was area editor of Cognitive Second Language Acquisition in the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), associate editor of Language Learning (2009-14), and is currently editor of Language, Interaction, and Acquisition and associate editor of Frontiers in Psychology.

Gullberg is a member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. In 2019, she received the European Second Language Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award. She is President of the International Society for Gesture Studies
2022-2025.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.

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