Moa Gärdenfors (born 1991 in Dalby, Sweden) is a Deaf Swedish linguist and researcher specializing in bilingualism among Deaf and hard-of-hearing populations. She serves as a senior lecturer (associate professor) at Stockholm University, with prominent work in the development of writing skills in Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children, particularly from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Her research integrates sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and corpus construction to understand how sign language proficiency informs written language development in DHH individuals.
Early Life and Education
Moa Gärdenfors was born in 1991 in Dalby, near Lund, and raised in Uppsala, Sweden. As a child, she studied Swedish Sign Language (STS) and developed an early interest in languages and bilingualism. She completed her MA in linguistics, focusing on the spelling and syntactic structure of Swedish Sign Language as produced by hearing second-language learners[4][5].
Academic and Research Career
Gärdenfors is currently appointed as a Senior Lecturer (associate professor) at the Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, where she leads multiple research projects[1].
Her ongoing projects include:
- A sociolinguistic and bimodal bilingual study of communication between signing parents and their hearing children (CODA, Children of Deaf Adults), aged 2–5.
- A longitudinal (diachronic) study of written texts collected from the same DHH children and teenagers over a span of approximately five years, aiming to create a corpus of their writing[1].
Research Focus and Contributions
Her doctoral work, culminating in a thesis, offers comprehensive insight into the written products and writing processes of DHH children, highlighting factors such as age, gender, age of acquisition, degree of hearing loss, and sign language proficiency[1].
Her research has explored how sign language proficiency influences written narrative development in DHH students, revealing that higher STS proficiency corresponds with greater adjective density and more complex sentence usage[1]. Her findings suggest that early exposure to sign language supports cognitive and linguistic outcomes in writing.
She has investigated writing processes using keystroke logging to compare DHH children with CODA peers and hearing counterparts. These studies show that while writing fluency may be slower in DHH children, the resulting written products are comparable to their peers, attributable to distinct writing strategies and early intervention supports[1].
She has also contributed to projects like Swe-CLARIN, developing infrastructure for sign language resources, and participated in annotation projects for Swedish Sign Language corpora[1].
Other Roles and Interests
In 2015, at age 23, Gärdenfors served as a temporary reporter for Dövas Tidning. During this time, she covered a wide range of topics including culture, sport, and education, and expressed a particular interest in statistics, bilingualism, and education-related issues [4].
Internationally, she engaged with research at the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience (LLCN), where she worked as a research assistant after completing her MA. There, she pursued broader inquiries into bilingualism among deaf, hard-of-hearing individuals, and children with cochlear implants[5]. Her interests extend beyond academia—she is noted to be an avid cat lover who enjoys cooking, foraging for chanterelles, and savoring coffee and ice cream during her free time[5].
- Stockholm University. (n.d.). Moa Gärdenfors – profile.
- Arnstad, M. (2019, November 28). Teckenspråkiga barn stavar bättre än sina jämnåriga. Språktidningen.
- Dövas Tidning (2015, January 19). Moa Gärdenfors är DT:s vikarierande reporter.
- LLCN Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience. (n.d.). Moa Gärdenfors.
