Niclas Abrahamsson
Niclas Abrahamsson is Professor of Swedish as a Second Language at Stockholm University and Director of the Centre for Research on Bilingualism since 2018, continuing the line of work associated with his long-time collaborator Kenneth Hyltenstam. He took his PhD on bilingualism at Stockholm in 2001 and held the chair in Swedish as a Second Language from 2010.
The programme is age of acquisition and ultimate L2 attainment, scrutinised. The headline result from Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam (2009) is that listener judgements routinely over-identify late learners as native-like, but none of the late starters in their sample passed detailed linguistic scrutiny. That sharpened the field's understanding of what "near-native" means and put empirical pressure on claims that the Critical Period Hypothesis can be decisively refuted by counter-examples. Follow-up work with Hyltenstam, Bylund, and colleagues has extended the finding across phonetic intuition, morphosyntax, and voice-onset time.
Career
- PhD, Stockholm University, 2001
- Full Professor of Swedish as a Second Language, Stockholm University, 2010
- Director, Centre for Research on Bilingualism, from 2018
- Continues the Stockholm programme on age effects and ultimate attainment
Published Work
- Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, "Age of onset and nativelikeness in a second language: Listener perception versus linguistic scrutiny," Language Learning (2009)
- Abrahamsson, "Age of onset and nativelike L2 ultimate attainment of morphosyntactic and phonetic intuition," Studies in Second Language Acquisition (2012)
- Stölten, Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam on VOT and near-native speakers
- Work with Bylund and Hyltenstam on the bilingualism-vs-age debate
Influence
- Made "scrutinised near-native" the standard bar for claims about adult L2 attainment
- Continues the Stockholm institutional programme on bilingualism research as Centre director
- Cited across both sides of the critical-period debate for the quality of the data