SPEAKIN Lab is a research group doing speech and language science. Our main interests are speech learning and adaptation, speech perception and production, and their dynamics across the lifespan, languages, language varieties, and accents. For more detail on what we do exactly, please see the projects page.
We’re scientists and students affiliated with the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences, the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and the Faculty of Medicine in Hradec Králové. Our experiments run mostly in LABELS, a.k.a. Laboratory of Behavioural and Linguistic Studies, as well as at schools, hospitals, and at collaborating institutions. We collaborate closely with the English department at Palacký University in Olomouc, as well as with universities and research institutes in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Australia.
Since its establishment in 2018, the research of our laboratory has been continuously funded from various external and internal sources. We have been supported by grants from the Czech Science Foundation, the Grant Agency of Charles University, the European Regional Development Fund and the Czech Ministry of Education, and programs supporting excellent research from Charles University (Primus program) and the Academy of Sciences (Lumina Quaeruntur).
We’re looking for little monolingual and bilingual participants. Do you have a child aged 1-30 months? Sign up for our research! In addition to learning about language acquisition, there is a reward waiting for you.
What’s new
18. 4. 2024
Our colleague, PhD student Lucie Jarůšková was awarded by Růžena Vacková Prize. “In addition to studying the effect of accents in specific interactions, we are also trying to figure out what might mitigate negative attitudes towards different speakers, at least from a linguistic and cultural point of view,” she says of her research. You can read the interview about multilingualism and the role of language in interactions here.
9. 4. 2024
Our dear colleague Natálie Kikotova won the undergraduate section of the International Student Psychology Days with her research on angry speech. She found that the adult brain reacts differently when listening to angry speech than when listening to neutral speech. When someone swears at us, neural activity in a frequency band specialized for concentration and learning increases significantly. Congratulations!
5. 4. 2024
Children’s nursery rhymes help to reveal the course of language development: not only about the groundbreaking Irish study on speech perception during the first year of life talked Kateřina Chládková in the program Science Plus in Czech Radio.
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We look forward to you!
