Nathalie Czeke

Profile

A teacher, a researcher, an adventurer, a curious mind – this is me.

I studied English, Politics and Economics at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and received my teaching degree (MA) in 2017. During my studies I became fascinated with language acquisition research and started working as a research assistant at the BabySpeechLab as well as the Centre for Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz. The same fascination led me to the Infant Studies Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where I spent two consecutive stays as a volunteer research assistant in 2015 and 2016. I joined the Infant Studies Centre once more for a one-year research stay in 2019 with a research scholarship for advanced education and training abroad. Following my curiosity, this personal and intellectual journey allowed me to develop a deeper theoretical and methodological understanding of language and I was able to gain hands-on research experience, including designing, running, and analysing behavioural experiments with infants.

After graduating, I continued to expand my involvement in empirical language acquisition research and worked as a research fellow at the BabySpeechLab and the PhonLab at the Department of Linguistics, both at the University of Konstanz. In all of these roles, I have been interested in understanding speech perception in the first years of life and applied myself to projects that centred around the acquisition of the phonetic and phonological structure of language, both at the segmental and the suprasegmental level with a special focus on the role of language input in speech perception and language processing.

Based at the University of Leeds, I am currently an Early Stage Researcher in the Childhood Deafness and Communication Research Marie-Sklodowska Curie Innovative Training Network – comm4CHILD (communication for children with hearing impairment to optimise language development).

Research interests

Complementing my interest in the role of language input on speech perception, my current research focuses on multimodal communication in the presence of sensory and communication asymmetries, i.e. communicative environments in which interactants do not share the same experience, skills and access to language. I’m interested in understanding how multimodal aspects of communication are involved to facilitate interaction between deaf and hearing individuals. The identification of such resources and the analysis of their employment shall be used to optimise language learning and development of hearing-impaired children as part of the comm4CHILD initiative.

Qualifications

• State Examination (=MA) English (Linguistics/Literature), Politics and Economics

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Language Education
• ICY: Inclusion, Childhood & Youth Research Centre