UNIVERSITY OF MINHO · SCHOOL OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES
PT | EN
Cristina Flores
Research
Research interests
Heritage language acquisition and maintenance
Language attrition and the reactivation of childhood languages (returnee bilinguals)
Child bilingualism, bilingual education and heritage language teaching
Cross-linguistic influence, language contact and code-switching
Morphosyntax of European Portuguese and German in bilingual and second language acquisition (pronouns and null objects, clitics, mood, verb placement, gender)
Portuguese and German as non-native languages
Research unit
Integrated researcher, Centre for Humanities/Centro de Estudos Humanísticos (CEHUM) – research group Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics.
Research projects
As Principal Investigator / Coordinator
2024–2026 — Principal Investigator (supervisor) of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship REBUILD (Horizon Europe MSCA European Fellowship, project no. 101110564; fellow: Maki Kubota). Funding: €156,778.56.
2014–2015 — Principal Investigator of the project Portuguese as a Heritage Language and Language Change (Português como Língua de Herança e mudança linguística), FCT Exploratory Research Project EXPL/MHC-LIN/0763/2013, CEHUM, University of Minho.
2010–2011 — Coordinator of the project Language attrition and language change: the Portuguese spoken by second-generation emigrants (Erosão e mudança linguística), CRUP–DAAD Integrated Portuguese-German Actions, in partnership with the University of Hamburg (Action A-18/10).
2008–2010 — Coordinator of the Portuguese team of the EU Lifelong Learning/Comenius project EUCIM-TE: European Core Curriculum for Mainstreamed Second Language – Teacher Education (141836-LLP-1-DE-COMENIUS-CMP).
2005–2008 — Principal Investigator of the project Portuguese-German Bilingualism in the European Context (O bilinguismo luso-alemão no contexto europeu), FCT, POCI/LIN/59780/2004.
As Co-PI / Team member
Since 2026 — Team member, MOVA – Multilingual Onset, Variation and Attrition: Ukrainian Children in Europe. Coordinating institution: UiT The Arctic University of Norway (coord. Natalia Mitrofanova). Funding: Research Council of Norway (FRIPRO).
2022 — 2024 Co-PI, Heritage Languages Go to School: The Role of (Extra)linguistic Factors in Successful Language Development. Coordinating institution: Lancaster University (coord. Patrick Rebuschat). Funding: British Academy (SRG22\220379).
Since 2022 — 2024 Team member, The Impact of Multilingualism on Children’s Academic and Cognitive Achievement. Coordinating institution: University of Minho (coord. Montserrat Comesaña). Funding: “la Caixa” Foundation (FP22_2B).
2012–2015 — Team member, CLAP – Complement Clauses in the Acquisition of Portuguese (Completivas na Aquisição do Português). University of Lisbon (coord. Ana Lúcia Santos). FCT, PTDC/CLE-LIN/120897/2010.
2011–2014 — Team member, Sociolinguistic Profile of Braga Speech (Perfil Sociolinguístico da Fala Bracarense). University of Minho/CEHUM (coord. Pilar Barbosa). FCT, PTDC/CLE-LIN/112939/2009.
Fellowships and other funding
2022–2024 — Mercator Fellow (by invitation), project EVOLVE (coord. Esther Rinke, Goethe University Frankfurt), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
2021–2024 — Mercator Fellow (by invitation), DFG Research Unit Emerging Grammars in Language-Contact Situations: A Comparative View (RUEG), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DFG ref. 39482131).
2020 — Summer school Portuguese in Contact: Principles and Practices in Research-Training, FCT special programme “Summer with Science” (co-coordinated with M. Ramon), funding €16,300.
International networks
Founding member of the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), a strategic partnership between Lancaster University, the University of Lisbon, the University of Minho, NOVA University Lisbon, the University of Porto, the University of Tübingen and Camões – Institute for Cooperation and Language (since 2017). https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/heritage-language/
Member of the Advisory Board of the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC), University of California, Los Angeles (since 2021).
Contact
Department of German and Slavic Studies
Departamento de Estudos Germanísticos e Eslavos,
Escola de Letras, Artes e Ciências Humanas (ELACH)
Universidade do Minho
Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Email: cflores@elach.uminho.pt
Online profiles
Scopus Author ID: 36903250800