My main research areas are second language acquisition and language assessment and testing. In my doctoral thesis from 2007, I developed tests for collocation knowledge for use with advanced learners of English, and evaluated the validity and reliability of the tests.

In addition to continuing research on word learning, phraseology and word testing, I am interested in experimental psycholinguistic methods for studying the bilingual and multilingual lexicon, and how lexical phrases are processed, stored and learned in adult bilingual individuals. I investigated this as PI in a three-year project funded by the Swedish Research Council (2013-2015). The project investigated how second language learners process English word combinations (e.g. 'free combinations', 'collocations', and 'idioms'), and how the learners' native language affects these processes.

Another project I have participated in is Multilingual Spaces, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2017-2021) m. Marie Källkvist as PI. The overall aim of the project was to develop a scientific basis for teaching English in multilingual classrooms.

I am currently involved in two externally funded projects: STAGE and TEAM. STAGE, which stands for STarting AGe and Extramural English, is a four-year project funded by the Research Council of Norway (2022-2025), with Pia Sundqvist as research leader. It examines our understanding of the connection between linguistic input and learning. Learners in Norway and Flanders (Belgium), countries where there is ample exposure to English but where the starting age for teaching English is different (grade 3 in Norway and 7 in Flanders) are tested in several language skill areas.

TEAM (Transdisciplinary Approaches to Learning, Acquisition, Multilingualism) is a research program funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2024-2029). Within this program, I am the PI for a three-year project: Compounds: A window onto the interplay between storage and computation in the mental lexicons of multilingual non-native English speakers. Using several psycholinguistic methods such as ‘masked priming lexical decision’ and ‘textual eyetracking’ as well as ‘visual world eyetracking’, we investigate how adult native speakers of Swedish, Finnish and Italian process and store compound nouns, and what implications this has for the multilingual mental lexicon.