Anne Mickan will defend her thesis Thursday 11th of March 2021

Link to live-stream.

If you have ever learned a foreign language, but stopped using it over time, you surely are familiar with the frustrating feeling of not being able to recall specific words in that language. In her PhD research, Anne Mickan asked why this happens. She approached this question from two angles: through experiments which tried to simulate language forgetting in the lab, testing what makes people forget foreign language words under controlled circumstances, and in a longitudinal study with recent study-abroad returnees who were naturally forgetting. Overall, her research suggests that forgetting is the consequence of language use and competition between the languages we speak. We forget words in foreign languages, for example, because we use other languages in the meantime, or because we learn new foreign languages.