Kateřina Chládková is a highly respected researcher at the Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, focusing on language acquisition, speech perception, and production. She leads the SPEAKin lab research group, which studies the development of the mother tongue from the prenatal period, as well as language learning and adaptation in childhood and adulthood. Most recently, she has worked as the PI in the consortium project CoRe. Kateřina Chládková, our guest in this edition of Forum Radio, discussed her team’s role in the project, researching how multilingualism fosters greater tolerance - and more.
Excerpts from our interview:
What is CoRe?
“CoRe is a big project administered by the Faculty of Arts at Charles University that involves different faculties and institutions, not just our own, working together on a common topic. CoRe stands for conflict and resilience. The official or longer title is The Role of Conflict in Building Resilience. We applied to be a part of this research project as we felt that the social sciences had a lot to contribute in studying the impact of conflict, not least with continuing and emerging situations all around us: two wars, effects of climate change, the experience of the Covid pandemic, and more. It is not so much about trying to eliminate conflict as it is about becoming more resilient as a result of a conflict. We felt that the social sciences and humanities had a lot to contribute in this respect.”
Research intents
“Conflict can be an opportunity: and we are looking for ways to exploit conflict (or perhaps mitigate it) and become stronger. There are nine work packages or research intents, including the study of sociological and religious aspects, education, history, information, and digitalization. One of the research intents is psycholinguistics and multilingualism. That is where my colleagues and I come in: our package is called Conflict and Communication, and we look at how conflicts arise in crises, as well as factors that affect our responses. We are trying to map how we can learn from crises not only as a society but also as individuals.”
Greater acceptance
“A big part of our package looks into how foreigners are perceived in Czechia, when they speak either in their own language or when they speak Czech, which they are learning as a second language. We are studying how locals react to accents and how accepting they actually are. Someone can be a foreigner but can still, of course, have Czech citizenship and still have an accent in Czech. We are interested in social attitudes and how those can change. The idea is not for the foreigner to have to speak ‘perfect’ Czech with perfect pronunciation, but for society to be more accepting and more tolerant and to understand that speaking with an accent is not something ‘bad’. The first thought of a listener or observer does not have to be them wondering ‘Where is the speaker from?’ but a focus on what they are saying.”
Cultural variation is key
“Many studies abroad, as well as previous studies we did ourselves, suggest that the more varied a cultural experience a person has, the less they are likely to be biased when it comes to foreign speakers. Someone with a richer experience will be less likely to judge another because of the way they speak… or the accent they have. It helps if you have experienced being a foreigner yourself: situations where you are the one with the foreign accent. When you experience an environment where there is a greater cultural mix, someone speaking a little differently becomes less unusual and more a regular part of everyday life.”
Perception and top-down influences
“Attitudes change, and how people respond depends also on how issues are framed in the public discourse and, for example, in politics and public life on a larger, even global scale. A good example is how Ukrainians were perceived by Czechs prior to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Until then, many Ukrainian immigrants working here were widely seen as ‘lower class’, working in jobs here like construction; with the outbreak of the war, there was a great rise in sympathy for Ukraine, and Czechs became more welcoming and friendly. That wave may now have passed, or at least somewhat: a lot really depends on how these things are talked about in the public sphere. I should point out that, as scientists, we are primarily interested in the cognitive aspects of the brain, how your brain ‘sees’ and ‘hears’, but at the same time, there are always also outside, top-down influences that can skew your perception. You can be brainwashed or influenced from the outside, and that can affect your response.”
Editor's note: This conversation was recorded in advance of unprecedented events on 28 February which saw Ukraine's head-of-state, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, berated in the White House by the sitting US president and vice-president in a fashion that is both shocking and unprecedented. The EU, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada all responded the same day by expressing the highest support for Ukraine. One can expect major shifts again in both public perception and in the discourse.
True or false?
“When it comes to acceptance, there are differences in how we test adults: with adults, we replicated studies that were done in countries like Canada, which is a super multilingual society, and applied them here. Ours is a very different environment, with far less variety, but against the backdrop of the ongoing conflicts I mentioned, and what we did was record people with accents, without accents, or with even regional accents or dialects—which can be equally important—and then played those statements or utterances for local participants. It is important to point out that statements were either true or false but purposely ambiguous, forcing you to think about the answer. An example of a statement might be: ‘Giraffes can go without water for longer than camels.’ And what we found was that many listeners were likely to believe a false statement delivered from someone speaking the same way as them, than believe a truthful statement from a foreigner, i.e., someone with an accent. So people are affected by how something is said. Part of this has roots in our evolutionary past; it is the in-group bias, and someone speaking differently indicates they do not belong to your group. This differentiation may have been necessary as a survival strategy in the distant past, but in multilingual societies, it is no longer ‘needed’. Studies have looked at whether it is a social bias or a deeper problem: simply difficulty understanding and processing speech—and even writing.”
Children and linguistic diversity
“We see similar biases with children, who we also study, and those biases increase as they enter the school system, where there is a tendency to prefer communication with others ‘like themselves’. These studies are not fully completed yet, but there are preliminary findings. The good news is that kids who are exposed to multilingualism earlier, from birth or in early childhood, where one of the parents speaks a foreign language, for example, are less likely to be biased when hearing others speak with a foreign accent in the future. At the same time, our linguistic community, at the educational level, is fairly rigid, as teachers are required to speak perfect Czech; local dialects or differences, unfortunately, are not greatly supported. In short, children who have greater exposure to languages are less likely to be biased as adults. Our society is much more homogeneous than places like Canada, and that is why we are so interested in researching multilingualism here. The project started a year ago, and we still have a lot ahead of us. A lot of this work is in the lab, which is tricky with children—but we want to go far more into real-life situations. We hope to bring new discoveries but also to make those public and apply our findings in the education system and help society become stronger.”
A better way to learn
“One of the ways in which our lab applies research results to offer the multilingual benefits to society is through collaboration with the Mooveez company on a new version of their language learning app. We aim to teach adults major languages in a way that is closer to how people actually acquire their native language. The idea is to offer language in a native and more natural way than other existing products, which monitor how often you sign in, but where it is questionable if you are actually picking up the new language. It is our hope that this collaboration and this app will help users not only learn a new language more easily but also contribute to the overarching goal of making society more accepting, more used to hearing different accents by different speakers. All of us can have these languages in our pocket, so to speak.”
| Forum Radio - Interview / Episode 19/ Kateřina Chládková - The Power of Multilingualism / Runtime: 30 min. and 11 sec. |
Kateřina Chládková is a researcher at the Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, focusing on language acquisition, speech perception, and production. She leads the SPEAKin lab research group, which studies the development of the mother tongue from the prenatal period, as well as language learning and adaptation in childhood and adulthood. The affable language acquisition expert is the Principle Investigator in the major consortium project known as CoRe, looking at the impact of conflict in its many forms in different societal settings and how conflict can be tempered to increase resilience.
