Marieke van den Akker joined the research project “Multilingual adaptations in novel language learning” (funded by NWO) as PhD candidate in October 2025. Within this research project, Marieke conducts the sub-project “Young children in a multilingual world”, in which she tries to find out why some young children are exposed to foreign languages more frequently than their peers, and what the consequences of this are for their ability to learn a new language. In addition to children growing up multilingual because one or both parent use a non-Dutch language with them, children can also hear foreign languages from other people in the neighbourhood, at daycare, or through, for example, videos. These are referred to as “incidental foreign language experiences”. Marieke investigates which factors cause some children to have more incidental foreign language experiences than others, what the relationship is between toddlers' experiences with English as a foreign language and their English proficiency when they are preschoolers, and which aspects of multilingual experiences (systematic or incidental) predict preschoolers’ ability to learn a new language. For more information about her research (or to take part), see the project website.

Marieke is supervised in her PhD research by Prof. Dr Elena Tribushinina, Prof. Dr Elma Blom, and Dr Tessel Boerma.

Background

Marieke received her BA English Language and Culture and her MA General Linguistics (cum laude) from Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. She previously worked as a research assistant on the “Quantifying Bilingual EXperiences” (Q-BEx) project (Radboud Universiteit), and at the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Marieke is enthusiastic about (language) science communication, and until recently worked as part of the crew and production assistant for the Kletskoppen Kindertaalfestival.