Professor Dagmar Divjak

Professor Dagmar Divjak

Department of Modern Languages
Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition

My main research interest is in understanding how our cognitive capacities give rise to the patterns we see in language and how language learners might use these patterns to build up knowledge of their language. I work with the Out Of Our Minds team to understand language knowledge and optimize language learning and am Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognitive Linguistics.

Qualifications

  • BA (KULeuven, Belgium), 1995
  • MA (KULeuven, Belgium), 1997
  • Academic Teacher Training (KULeuven, Belgium), 1997
  • Specialization in Polish Language and Culture (UJ Krakow, Poland), 1998
  • PhD (KULeuven, Belgium), 2004

Biography

Originally from Belgium, I completed my Undergraduate and Postgraduate training in Slavonic Philology at the KULeuven, Belgium. I also hold a Degree in Teaching Modern Foreign Languages from the same institution. After I had spent a year in Poland specializing in Polish Language and Culture (UJ Krakow, Poland), I returned to my Alma Mater to teach Russian at the Undergraduate level. Frustrated by the inadequacy of the grammatical descriptions I could offer my students, I embarked on a PhD in linguistics, funded by the Research Council (FWO Flanders), in 2000.

After obtaining my PhD in 2004, I spent one year at the UNC at Chapel Hill (USA, 2004-2005) as a BAEF Francqui Fellow and one year at the University of Stockholm (Sweden, 2005-2006) as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO Flanders). 

I joined the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield (UK) in September 2006 as a Lecturer in Slavonic Languages and Linguistics and was promoted to Chair in 2018. I have held a wide range of administrative and leadership roles. Notably, as Director of Russian & Polish I lead and revamped UG language programs in Russian and Polish and as Director of the Centre for Linguistic Research I lead on the establishment of the HumLab, an experimental facility for interdisciplinary research in Arts & Humanities. 

In January 2019 I joined the University of Birmingham as Professorial Research Fellow and am working with the Out of our Minds team to understand language and make language learning a more natural and rewarding experience. In 2020 I was elected a member of the Academia Europaea (MAE).

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Grose-Hodge, M, Dabrowska, E & Divjak, D 2025, 'Bilingual acquisition during school years: predictors of achievement in the societal and heritage language', Frontiers in Language Sciences, vol. 3, 1419563. https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2024.1419563

Mackiewicz, J, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2025, 'Error-correction learning of second language verbal morphology: associating imperfect contingencies in naturalistic frequency distributions', Language Learning.

Sun, H, Divjak, D & Milin, P 2025, 'Introducing Fluency Measures to the Elicited Imitation Task', Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, vol. 4, no. 1, 100176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100176

Divjak, D, Milin, P & Borowski, M 2025, 'On the learnability of aspectual usage', Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

He, S, Divjak, D & Milin, P 2025, 'Optimising Participant Grouping Methods in Bilingualism Studies: Insights from Eye-Tracking Data', Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.24019.he

Grose-Hodge, M, Dabrowska, E & Divjak, D 2024, 'Beyond accuracy: Fluency and complexity in the spoken output of bilingual and monolingual preadolescents', Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 328-356. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmbs.23513

Sun, H, Čolović, P, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, 'L1 listeners’ evaluations of LX speech: the role of listener expectations and personality traits', Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2024.2402489

Divjak, D, Testini, I & Milin, P 2024, 'On the nature and organisation of morphological categories: verbal aspect through the lens of associative learning', Journal of Morphology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-024-09423-0

Romain, L, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, 'Order Effects in Second Language Learning', Language Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12675

Divjak, D, Sun, H & Milin, P 2024, 'Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge', Journal of Neurolinguistics, vol. 69, 101177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2023.101177

Romain, L, Hanzlikova, D, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, 'Ruled by construal? Framing article choice in English', Constructions and Frames, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.22005.rom

Romain, L & Divjak, D 2024, 'The types of cues that help you learn: Pedagogical implications of a computational simulation on learning the English tense/aspect system from exposure', Pedagogical Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.23003.rom

Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, 'When there’s more than one elephant in the room: Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language', Cognitive Psychology Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 9, pp. 7-15. https://doi.org/10.53841/bpscog.2024.1.9.7

Milin, P, Tucker, BV & Divjak, D 2023, 'A learning perspective on the emergence of abstractions: The curious case of phone(me)s', Language and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2023.11

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Madabushi, HT, Romain, L, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2025, Construction Grammar and Language Models. in M Fried & K Nikiforidou (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 572-595. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009049139.023

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