Currently, the group consists of the following members:
Luca Cilibrasi, Principal Investigator, Ianthi Tsimpli, co-investigator, Nicoletta Biondo, Postdoc, Julia Heine, PhD student, Lucie Jiranková, PhD student, Petra Čechová, PhD student, Jirina Dunková, research assistant. Scroll down for short bios.
Our research is based at Charles University, in Prague, and is conducted in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and the University of Siena, where our members are completing part of their work.
Luca Cilibrasi is lecturer in psycholinguistics at Charles University. Before his appointment in Prague, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, a PhD at Reading University and BA and MA studies at the University of Siena. His main interests are acquisition in bilinguals and in children with language impairment.
Ianthi Tsimpli is co-director of the research centre Cambridge Language Sciences and chair of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She has published extensively on first and second language acquisition, linguistic theory and language disorders of various kinds. As part of this project, she co-supervises one PhD and one postdoc.
Nicoletta Biondo holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Trento and completed a postdoc at the Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language. She is currently affiliated with the University of Siena and works part-time in this project.
Julia Heine holds a degree in German linguistics from the University of Leipzig, and she is currently a third year PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her interests are bilingualism and electrophysiological measures of the brain.
Lucie Jirankova holds BA and MA degrees from Charles University. She is currently investigating the acquisition of inflectional morphology in adult L2 speakers of English with L1 Czech.
Petra Čechová holds BA and MA degrees from Charles University. Her research interests concern mainly syntax and psycholinguistics. In her PhD project, she investigates usage of Czech inflectional morphology in monolingual speakers (and how it differs from that of bilinguals).
Jirina Dunkova holds BA and MA degrees from Charles University. Before her appointment in this project, she has been working as an English teacher for Czech L1 speakers.
Roberto Blas Sileo (former member of Primus) holds degrees from the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Before his appointment in the Primus project he has worked as a research associate at the University of Cambridge, where he is currently an affiliated lecturer. Roberto’s research focuses on anaphora resolution in children and adults.
In addition to the work conducted by these members, our research is vitally pushed forward by students completing their thesis within the realm of the project. At the moment these are: Kateřina Hasalová (Nonword repetition in bilinguals. Does performance differ from SLI?), Daniela Markova (The acquisition of prepositions through gaming) and Tina Skočilová (The development of L2 phonology assessed with a reading task).
