Carmen Kleinherenbrink is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). She teaches in the Nederlandkunde/Dutch Studies bachelor's program and regularly organizes activities for both students and instructors to engage them in international Dutch studies. An example of this is the Summer School for teacher-researchers, in collaboration with the University of Utrecht and the Taalunie. Her doctoral research focuses, from a multilingual perspective, on language change and the acquisition of the present perfect tense to express the past, particularly in Dutch and Spanish as a second language. Kleinherenbrink also works as the copyeditor in the editorial team of the interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal of the Faculty of Humanities: The New Scholar. Additionally, she actively advocates for the principles of science communication and open science, emphasizing their significance within academic discourse.

More information about Carmen Kleinherenbrink

Fields of interest

• Second Language Acquisition
• Multilingualism
• Language variation and change
• Tense, aspect, and modality
• The Present Perfect

Research

The PhD research project "Talking about the past: make it simple before perfect" tries to respond with practical applications to the questions of both learners and teachers who struggle with using, understanding or explaining the variation in past time expressions for second language learners of Dutch and Spanish.  

"Ik heb hem net gesproken" vs. "ik sprak hem net"
"Have you seen that movie?" vs. "did you see that movie?"  
"He desayunado mucho" vs. "desayuné mucho"

The research focuses on how sociolinguistic variation among native speakers can affect the acquisition of grammatical structures in past time expressions.

Feel free to contact me with examples of language use and language- or research-related questions via email or LinkedIn. 

Publications