Second language research in Romance languages has a solid tradition at SU and has developed strongly over the past two decades. Since the beginning of the 1990s, research has been carried out on the learning of French based on the INTERFRA corpus. Since the beginning of the millenium there is also a corresponding corpus in Italian, INTERITA. These two databases consist of transcribed recordings of students in French and Italian as well as control material with native speakers in both languages. The Spanish database AKSAM, developed in the 90's, consists of transcribed video recordings of Spanish teachers in two activities and has also generated important research in the field.
In the RJ-funded program High-Level Proficiency in Second Language Use (AAA), in addition to English and Swedish, we have worked with French, Italian and Spanish as a second language. The AAA program has resulted in several fruitful collaborations across language boundaries, including the creation of the Multi-task corpus, with materials from highly advanced users of French, Spanish and English. Learning research in Romance languages is well represented at international conferences, journals and in international book publishing and has thus taken a strong position at the international research front.
Areas studied in French mainly concern language structure: tempus / aspect, congruence, gender attribution, syntactic complexity, negatives, discourse markers, dislocation in spoken language. An important area is vocabulary, with emphasis on the assignment and use of multi-page structures. Recently, researchers and doctoral students have begun to be interested in psychological factors, such as personality and aptitude and social factors, such as integration.
In Italian, one has researched in the fields of verb morphology, discourse markers and vocabulary development. Cross-linguistic influences in the lexicon and syntax have been studied in both French and Italian. For the Italian side, the L3 perspective has been particularly important.
For the Spanish part, the focus has been mainly on pragmatic aspects (discourse markers and other modalities) and the use of multiword structures in speech. Extensive research has been conducted in the area of intercultural communication, primarily based on the AKSAM Corpus.
Spanish, Portuguese and Italian as heritage languages is an emerging research area.
In Portuguese, research has been conducted on simultaneous first language acquisition in Swedish-speaking environments with Portuguese as weaker languages.
Language educationis a research field that is closely linked to other languages. Within Spanish, research is conducted concerning motivation among Spanish students in Sweden. A large part of second language research - including several ongoing dissertation projects - has direct relevance to language education, and at the master's level a growing number of degree projects are devoted to language educational topics.