Nathalie Czeke
- Position: Postdoctoral Researcher - Deaf Education
- Areas of expertise: language acquisition, deaf and hard-of-hearing children, multilingualism, multimodality, early parent-child interactions, (language) development
- Email: N.Czeke@leeds.ac.uk
- Location: 1.06 Hillary Place
- Website: LinkedIn | Researchgate | ORCID
Profile
A teacher, a researcher, an adventurer, a curious mind...
I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the AHRC-DFG-co-funded project ‘Reframing Multilingualism: Examining the Multilingual Experiences and Repertoires of DHH Children Growing up in Migrant Contexts of Germany and the UK’. The project is a collaboration between the University of Leeds, University College London and the University of Cologne, Germany.
As an Early-Stage Researcher in the Childhood Deafness and Communication Research Marie-Sklodowska Curie Innovative Training Network – Comm4CHILD – I completed my PhD in 2025 with Prof Ruth Swanwick and Dr Ted Killan between the School of Education and the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds. My PhD research, ‘Access to and Opportunities for Communication for Deaf Children in Early Parent-Child Interactions’, focused on the multimodal analysis of moments of joint attention.
My academic background builds on the extensive empirical research experience in Linguistics and Early Developmental Psychology, which I gained during the six years working as a research assistant/fellow at the Baby Speech Lab at the University of Konstanz (2014-2020), Germany and the UBC Infant Studies Centre in Vancouver, Canada (2015, 2016, 2019-2020). I hold a teaching degree in English, Politics and Economics, completing a Master of Education at the University of Konstanz in 2017.
Research interests
In my research, I focus on the early (language) development of young deaf and hard-of-hearing children in diverse contexts. More specifically, I’m interested in language acquisition and, more specifically, multimodal and multilingual communication in diverse linguistic and social environments in the early years of life. With the aim to understand and support the communicative experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing children, I develop and draw on mixed context-sensitive methodologies that consider the situated and interactive nature of language learning and development.
Student education
I occasionally support the Deaf Education Programme (Teacher of the Deaf Qualification) at the School of Education, University of Leeds.