Prof. Dr. Laura Rosseel

Laura Rosseel studied Linguistics and Literature at KU Leuven (2007-2010), where she obtained her MA in Linguistics in 2011. After obtaining her teaching degree in Leuven, she pursued an MSc by Research in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 2013 where she further developed her interest in sociolinguistic variation. Being awarded a FWO fellowship, Laura joined the QLVL group at KU Leuven in 2013 as a PhD student. In September 2017, she defended her thesis ‘New approaches to measuring the social meaning of language variation. Exploring the Personalized Implicit Association Test and the Relational Responding Task’. In 2017, she took up a postdoctoral position at the University of Cologne, after which she joined QLVL again, working as a postdoctoral researcher on the experimental component of the project ‘Exploring probabilistic grammar(s) in varieties of English around the world’. Laura was granted a postdoctoral fellowship from the Flemish research council in 2019. In the same year, she joined the Vrije Universiteit Brussels where she currently holds the position of associate professor in Dutch language and sociolinguistics.

Laura's research interests lie in the fields of (developmental) sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and experimental linguistics. Her PhD research focused on innovating the measurement of the social meaning of language variation. More specifically, she studied on a number of implicit attitude measures recently developed in social psychology and investigated whether it is possible to adapt these new attitude measures and use them to study language attitudes. In her current work, Laura is further applying these new methods to study the social meaning of language variation in various speech communities, and particularly to measure the acquisition of language attitudes in children and adults.

Current projects

• 2024-2029

  Title: “Towards multilingual language histories: Dutch in context and contact”

  Funding body: VUB – Strategic Research Programmes (SRP Spearhead)

  Supervisors: Prof Dr Rik Vosters (PI), Prof Dr Wim Vandenbussche, Prof Dr Laura Rosseel, Prof Dr Philipp Krämer

• 2023-2026

  Title: “Two languages in my kete – a developmental sociolinguistics approach to cultural nuance and social identity in everyday kiwi words”

  Funding body: Marsden Fund – Royal Society of New Zealand

  Supervisors: Prof Dr Andreea Calude (PI, Waikato University), Prof Dr Eline Zenner (KU Leuven), Prof Dr Laura Rosseel (VUB), Prof Dr Hemi Whaanga (Massey University)

  PhD Researchers: Jessie Burnette and Alex Pohl

• 2021-2025

  Title: “Acquiring social meaning of language variation: an experimental exploration” (G003221N)

  Funding body: Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)

  Supervisors: Prof Dr Laura Rosseel (PI), Prof Dr Eline Zenner (KU Leuven)

  PhD Researcher: Moira Van Puyvelde

Past projects

• 2022-2023

  Title: “The development of socially meaningful language variation in (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome” (1105623N)

  Funding body: Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)

  Supervisors: Prof Dr Eline Zenner (PI, KU Leuven), Prof Dr Laura Rosseel (VUB), Prof Dr Ellen Rombouts (KU Leuven)

  PhD Researcher: Nina Arisci

• 2020-2024

  Title: “Children’s social evaluations of English elements in Dutch: an experimental approach” (1110921N)

  Funding body: Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)

  Supervisors: Prof Dr Laura Rosseel, Prof Dr Eline Zenner (KU Leuven)

  PhD Researcher: Gillian Roberts

• 2013-2017

  FWO PhD fellowship

  Title: New approaches to measuring the social meaning of language variation. Exploring the Personalized Implicit Association Test and the Relational Responding Task

  Funding body: Research Foundation Flanders

Selected publications

• Schuring, M., Rosseel, L., & Zenner, E. (2024). Expectation through imitation: towards a unified protocol for roleplay in developmental sociolinguistics. Language Sciences, 104, [101635].
• Rosseel, L. (2022). The Implicit Association Test paradigm. In R. Kircher, & L. Zipp (Eds.), Research Methods in Language Attitudes (pp. 250-267). Cambridge University Press. 
• Engel, A., Grafmiller, J., Rosseel, L., & Szmrecsanyi, B. (2022). Assessing the complexity of lectal competence: the register-specificity of the dative alternation after give. Cognitive Linguistics, 33(4), 727-766. 
• Nguyen, D., Rosseel, L., & Grieve, J. (2021). On learning and representing social meaning in NLP: a sociolinguistic perspective. In K. Toutanova, A. Rumshisky, L. Zettlemoyer, D. Hakkani-Tur, I. Beltagy, S. Bethard, R. Cotterell, T. Chakraborty, & Y. Zhou (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (pp. 603-612). Association for Computational Linguistics. 
• Zenner, E., Grondelaers, S., Rosseel, L., Speelman, D., Esselinckx, M., & Rombouts, E. (2021). The competence of the professional standard language speaker in flux? Support from the speech therapy context. Language & Communication, 81, 1-16.  
• Zenner, E., Rosseel, L., & Speelman, D. (2020). Starman or Sterrenman: an acquisitional perspective on the social meaning of English in Flanders. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(3), 568-591.  
• Rosseel, L., & Grondelaers, S. (Guest eds.) (2019). Implicitness and experimental methods in language variation research. Special issue in Linguistics Vanguard, 5(s1), [20180005, 20180007, 20180010, 20180011, 20180012, 20180006, 20180069, 20180008].  
• Rosseel, L., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2019). The relational responding task (RRT): a novel approach to measuring social meaning of language variation. Linguistics Vanguard, 5(s1).  
• Rosseel, L., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2019). Measuring language attitudes in context: Exploring the potential of the Personalized Implicit Association Test. Language in Society, 48(3), 429-461.  
• Rosseel, L., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2018). Measuring language attitudes using the Personalized Implicit Association Test: A case study on regional varieties of Dutch in Belgium. Journal of Linguistic Geography, 6(1), 20-39.