Abstract
The article reports on a newly-founded lab that focuses on infant language development. The research group started in 2018 at Charles University, and represents a direct collaboration between the Faculty of Arts and the Medical Faculty in Hradec Králové.
The group investigates the earliest stages of speech sound acquisition, with primary focus on vowels, which are the first sounds that infants master. Lab members work in three streams, examining the input to which infants are exposed from 3 months before to 11 months after birth, assessing prenatal speech sound category learning in electrophysiological experiments with newborns, and further tracing the development of various types of phonological contrasts throughout the first year of life.