2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 and older
8. 11. 2024
What does it mean to be a bilingual speaker? Can bilingualism have any risks? Is there fake bilingualism? And what is bimodal bilingualism?
We have published a booklet Children and Bilingualism as part of the Science Around Us series. The booklet was co-authored by Kateřina Chládková, Lucie Jarůšková and Michaela Svoboda. You can read the brochure here or we will be happy to give it to you in our lab.
4. 11. 2024
The Week of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic is starting. We have prepared three workshops for you: How many languages do you know…, What is bilingualism and Experience the linguistic laboratory. Read more here.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Watch a recording of the event in our lab here.
8. 10. 2024
Kateřina Chládková is among the five talented scientists of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic who have been selected for the Hope of Czech Science column in the metropolitan magazine City Life MF Dnes.
You can read the full interview with Katka and the other scientists in the MF DNES archive.
- 9. 2024
Next week we are already waiting for the conference Biennial of Czech Linguistics 2024, which we are co-organizing. You can look forward, for example, to a special panel Multilingualism in the Czech Republic, which will take place on Tuesday, 17 September at 5 pm at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.
A recording of the event is available here.
13. 8. 2024
What to do to make children speak better? Drop the pacifier early, let the kids drum and take a ball to help. It is not only the phenomenon of baby signs that Kateřina Chládková and Michaela Svoboda talk about in an interview for Hospodářské noviny.
29. 7. 2024
How to teach English in kindergarten? Don’t teach vocabulary and throw away the textbooks. The Minister of Education wants to expand the teaching of foreign languages in Czech schools. In an interview with Seznam Zprávy, Kateřina Chládková explains how to approach the teaching of foreign languages and what to avoid.
17. 7. 2024
How to learn a foreign language effectively, in childhood and adulthood? Is there an (anti)talent for languages? Do I do irreversible damage if I speak to my child with mistakes? Do bilingual children have any handicaps? Kateřina Chládková answers these and other questions in her interview Jak a kdy je nejlepší „nasát“ cizí jazyk [How and when it is best to “absorb” a foreign language] for Deník N.
If you prefer to listen, you can also listen to the interview Učíme se víc gramatiku, než schopnost komunikovat [We learn more grammar than the ability to communicate] for the Inbox podcast about the language learning and Czech education system, the functionality of the popular Duolingo app or the myths surrounding bilingualism.
26. 6. 2024
In July we will attend the prestigious international conference COGSCI 2024 in the Netherlands. The studies will be presented by Kateřina Chládková (Tuning in to a novel language is easier without orthography), Kateřina Kynčlová (Neural Indices of Online Statistical Learning in Visual Speech), Martina Dvořáková (Newborns’ neural tracking of infant-directed and adult-directed speech in native and foreign language) and Natálie Kikót’ová (Neural oscillatory and ERP indices of prediction in emotional speech).
We are also co-organizing the IASCL 2024, international conference on language acquisition in children, which will take place this July in Prague at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. We are looking forward to you!
28. 5. 2024
In June, we will be participating in the Workshop on Infant Language Development 2024 in Lisbon. Michaela Svoboda (Verbal and conceptual development of vocabulary in Czech-learning children with cochlear implants), Martina Dvořáková (Newborns’ neural tracking of infant-directed and adult-directed speech in native and foreign language) and Lucie Jarůšková (Preferences for L1-accented speakers in Czech-learning toddlers: behavioural and neural indices) will present their studies in the form of a poster.
10. 5. 2024
We would love to see you at the lectures and workshops at the multi-genre festival Czech Language Day in Kampus Hybernská, which takes place on 28th May. Come to Kateřina Chládková’s lecture Language (not only) of babies: how we acquire (mother) language or Lucie Jarůšková’s Bilingualism and bilingual education: myths and bilingual children learning Czech.
In the afternoon we also organize a practical workshop Experience the linguistic laboratory for children and adults.
- 5. 2024
Kateřina Chládková talked about bilingualism and language acquisition in the podcast Jak ti je? [How are you?]. You can listen to the episode called How we learn language and speech on Youtube or Spotify.
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 Kikoťová 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.
You can read more about this research in a commentary in the AVČR magazine.
12. 3. 2024
The Brain Week 2024, a festival of the latest trends in brain research and neuroscience, has kicked off. Kateřina Chládková will give a lecture on the Language of infants: the attunement of the newborn brain to the mother’s language (more about the Language of infants project here). We also recommend a lecture on Language Development Disorders: brain, genes and communication by Filip Smolík from the AVČR.
10. 3. 2024
The guest of the podcast Na pokec was Kateřina Chládková. You will learn, among other things, what American scientists found when they examined the brain of a dead salmon by magnetic resonance imaging. The podcast entitled On how to control your brain and learn things better and faster is available on YouTube or Spotify.
6. 3. 2024
Kateřina Chládková, Michaela Svoboda and Lucie Jarůšková are part of the research project Conflict in communication: multilingualism and psycholinguistics in the inter-faculty project CoRe. You can read about how we perceive and sometimes judge speakers by the way they speak in this article in Forum magazine.
7. 2. 2024
Language can deceive our senses – how we hear with our eyes or how we subconsciously evaluate speakers after only a few tenths of a second can be read in the article by Kateřina Chládková in the new issue of the magazine Vesmír.
19. 1. 2024
We kindly invite you to the Cognitive School 2024, which we co-organize within the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences. It will take place next week, from Thursday 25th to Sunday 28th January 2024.
In the programme, the members of the speakinlab will present several projects: a lecture will be given by Maroš Filip on Semantic and syntactic anomalies in Czech: an ERP study (a joint project with Filip Smolík), Natálie Kikoťová on The effect of negative emotion on neural speech tracking and lexical processing, Monika Kučerová on Preschoolers’ production of L2 vowels is affected by input quality: A longitudinal study and Martina Dvořáková on Neural preparedness for spoken language: neural speech tracking in newborns of Czech-speaking, Russian-speaking, and signing mothers.
In the poster session, Lucie Jarůšková will be presenting the project Perceptual biases for L1-accented speakers in infants: prior studies and our pilot data and Kateřina Kynčlová and Michaela Svoboda on Neural tracking of visual-only speech.
We look forward to seeing you!
4. 1. 2024
For the journal Vox pediatriae, aimed at paediatricians and other professionals working with children, we have prepared an article on Bilingual children and bilingual upbringing, in collaboration with doc. Filip Smolík from the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The article can be read here.