Marianne Gullberg is a Swedish psycholinguist specializing in second language acquisition, processing and the study of gesture.[1]
Gullberg carried out her doctoral research at Lund University between 1993 and 1997. After short-term positions there and at Kristianstad University, she took up a postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in 2000, where she was appointed Senior Research Scientist in 2003.[1] In 2008 she became a tenured associate professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, retaining her research role at the Max Planck Institute and co-founding the Nijmegen Gesture Centre alongside Aslı Özyürek. In 2010 she was appointed Professor of Psycholinguistics and Director of the Humanities Lab at Lund University.[1] [2]
Gullberg is known for her research on language acquisition and gesture. Her early work reacted against the theory-driven structuralism of Swedish general linguistics at the time by seeking to investigate language use.[2] Gullberg's research has called into question stereotypes about gesture usage across cultures, such as the idea that Italians use more gestures than speakers of other languages.[2] In her work she has drawn on electromagnetic articulography and EEG methods alongside the traditional methods of the humanities, and aims to make a contribution to second language teaching.[2]
Gullberg has been the recipient of several honours and awards. In June 2015 she was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,[3] [4] and in March 2019 she was awarded the academy's Ann-Kersti and Carl-Hakon Swenson Prize for humanities and social science research.[5] She was elected Member of the Academia Europaea in 2017.[1] In 2019 she was the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award of the European Second Language Association, for whom she had previously served as vice-president.[6]