The four-year project, which was successful in the Social Sciences and Humanities: man and humanity in today's global challenges call for projects, brings together local research leaders in linguistics, psychology and neuroscience to provide insights for the new challenges of a multilingual global world. Masaryk University will be represented by the Faculty of Arts and the Central European Institute of Technology of Masaryk University (CEITEC MU), while partners include Charles University and the Institute of Psychology of the CAS. Pavel Caha, Vice-Dean for Research and Project Management of the Faculty of Arts, describes the unique scientific plan.
How did the theme of the project come about and what makes it unique?
The project focuses on language, how we learn it in childhood, how we use it in adulthood and what challenges await us in old age due to the weakening of brain structures. So in that sense the project is not unique, it deals with problems that have been with us since time immemorial. The uniqueness of the project is more in the fact that we have managed to convince leading Czech linguists, psychologists and neurologists to collaborate with us, to strengthen this team with great experts from abroad and to show that these topics are still relevant for humans today, perhaps even more than before.
Within the Faculty of Philosophy, research will take place at six philological departments. Which ones are they?
My goal is that the project will leave a lasting mark on the Faculty of Arts and impact the institution as a whole. So I approached colleagues from different departments who are leaders in their fields. In addition to research, their task is to bring at least one postdoc, ideally from abroad, to their team. If these people stay, it will be an advantage for us in the future. Thus, the Department of English and American Studies, the Department of Czech Language, the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages, the Department of German, Scandinavian and Netherland Studies, the Department of Classical Studies and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures are involved in research.
What will be their specific task?
It is a mixture of purely practical and theoretical problems that complement each other. I'll start from the practical end. Take the migration crisis, for example. One of the conditions for the successful integration of a person is that they learn a new language as quickly as possible. People often imagine this process by putting students in a classroom, giving them textbooks, workbooks. But when you look at real situations, it doesn't work like that. One of the researchers on the project, Egle Mocciaro, has long been researching the language of migrants in southern Italy. In this population, up to 30 percent of adults are very low literate. In this context, it becomes clear that our theory and practice of teaching, based on the idea of the school classroom, is not working. Egle explores these contexts and discovers a very specific course of language acquisition.
Are there other research activities related to learning research?
Learning research will also be carried out by our colleagues from the Department of English and American Studies Thomas Rankin. Tom is working on one of the paradoxes related to frequency. It would be normal to expect that what is frequent in a language, what is repeated, is learned first and best. But look at the English articles, for example. They are some of the most frequent English words, yet many people never learn them properly. Conversely, people are able to easily learn some phenomena that are very rare. These are phenomena in which, because of their low frequency, even large language models err. But people almost never make mistakes in them. It turns out that in addition to frequency, general linguistic principles apply in learning.
These are the theoretical aspects of the research?
Yes, we are building on years of research on universals, properties that apply to all languages. For example, many languages distinguish between animate and inanimate entities in their grammar. One example is Czech with its distinction between masculine animate and inanimate. But no language distinguishes edible from inedible entities in its grammar: we do not have “edible and inedible” genders in Czech or anywhere else. We investigate these properties and try to explain them. Some colleagues, of whom I will mention Michal Starke, develop a theory of language according to which all human languages are identical at some level of abstraction. They share basic grammatical meanings, including, for example, animacy, but not edibility. These general properties are then manifested in learning. We call this theory nanosyntax because it suggests that we compose sentences from these tiny and often hard-to-detect meanings. Colleagues are also working on other aspects of language – Radek Čech on frequency, Markéta Ziková on sound, Jana Mikulová on language development, Marcin Wągiel on meaning, and Mojmír Dočekal and Radim Lacina on real-time language processing. A team from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, led by Radek Šimík, is also collaborating with us on the research.
What will psychologists and neuroscientists be involved in and what will interdisciplinary collaboration look like?
The research project of Filip Smolík from the Institute of Psychology of the CAS investigates language acquisition in children. Ľubomíra Nováková's project from CEITEC focuses on understanding the changes associated with pathological or physiological ageing. In the project, we are planning joint conferences and want to create a basis for future collaborative research. This type of collaboration is a global trend.
Do you plan to benefit from experience and/or partnership cooperation from abroad?
In some aspects, international cooperation is indispensable for us, for example in research on the language of migrants in southern Italy. International cooperation is also important for us to ensure the visibility of the project. We are going to collaborate with about 15 foreign universities. The northernmost is behind the Arctic Circle in Tromsø, Norway, and the southernmost in Palermo. The furthest is at the University of Arizona. So in terms of geography alone, the project is going to get to a lot of interesting places.
What practical impact will the research have?
Communication is one of our most important skills. Sometimes we don't realise how easily it can be disrupted. I had the opportunity to see this for myself when my children were growing up in Norway, where I worked for about ten years. It brought many challenges. By the project contributing, among other things, to understanding how children learn to speak and understand, we can use the knowledge gained to diagnose and identify language development disorders, including those in multilingual children, early on. We can develop teaching practices that are based on the natural way of acquiring language. The same is true for adults. Ľubomíra Nováková's team is then going to investigate new methods of non-invasive brain stimulation and the possibility of using it to improve language function in neurodegenerative diseases.
The project “A whole life with language: the nature and ontogeny of linguistic communication (LangInLife)”, reg. no. CZ.02.01.01/00/23_025/0008726, is implemented within the framework of the Operational Programme Jan Amos Komenský co-financed by the European Union. The project succeeded in the call with the subtitle Man and Humanity in the Global Challenges of Today, which was aimed at supporting the potential of social sciences and humanities. The projects could receive a maximum of 150 million crowns. The implementation period is until the end of 2028.