I am a researcher of language development and reading acquisition in monolingual and multilingual children. I am looking for answers to questions related to how children develop language and how this development can be measured.
I am currently working at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Warsaw in the scientific team MultiLADA, together with which I conduct research on the linguistic development of monolingual and multilingual children.
I have defended two doctoral theses: in psychology at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Warsaw (on the mental lexicon of children with typical language development and developmental language disorder) and in neuroscience at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (on the neural basis of phonological deficits in children with developmental dyslexia). I also completed a master's degree in psychology and a bachelor's degree in mathematics.
I have co-authored dozens of scientific articles on the linguistic development of monolingual and multilingual children, methods of measuring linguistic development, characteristics of words used in research, and various aspects of reading development in children with developmental dyslexia. As a researcher, I have participated in multiple scientific projects using various research techniques (e.g., fMRI, eye-tracking, questionnaires), also conducted in international collaborations.
I am interested in language development and reading acquisition in monolingual and multilingual children, under conditions of typical development and under conditions of neurodiversity. I am also interested in issues related to the development of tools for assessing children's language development.
2024
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2016
Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks CLTs
Since 2011, I have been involved in the development of the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks CLTs: an innovative method that aims to comparatively measure children's vocabulary in different languages. CLTs are picture recognition and picture naming tasks used to measure the vocabulary of children between the ages of 3 and 6. Currently, there are about 40 language versions of CLTs developed according to a universal cross-linguistic procedure that I co-developed (Haman, Łuniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015). I am involved in the development of CLTs on all possible fronts: I support the authors in the development of new language versions, conduct research using the Polish (and not only) version of the CLT, study the validity and reliability of the CLT, check whether the CLT can be replaced by a questionnaire filled out by parents. I am eager to share the experience I have gathered by co-developing the tasks in more than 30 language versions in next projects.
The results of research related to the use and development of the CLT have been published in a series of publications, e.g. Łuniewska et al., 2022, Łuniewska et al., 2019, Łuniewska et al., 2016, Wolna et al., 2023, Hansen et al., 2019, Haman et al., 2017, Hansen et al., 2017.
The project originates from the COST Bi-SLI action and currently it is funded in the Excellence Initiative – Research University (2020-2026) program at the University of Warsaw and carried out by the MultiLADA lab. More about CLTs: here.
Since 2024, I have been conducting research on the linguistic, cognitive and emotional functioning of children raised in so-called “intentional bilingualism.” In Poland, more and more families are introducing - in addition to Polish - an additional language of communication at home, most often English. According to preliminary estimates, parents in up to 7% of families of high socioeconomic status choose to speak English to their children at least some of the time, even though they come from monolingual families and have lived in Poland all their lives and learned English at school. To date, there has been no systematic study of how the linguistic development of children raised in such a linguistic situation proceeds.
The project is funded by National Science Centre, project's description: here.
In Polish-Norwegian cooperation, as the MultiLADA team, we conducted research on the trajectory of language development and the development of world knowledge in three groups of children: monolingual children in Poland, monolingual children in Norway and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children. In the PolkaNorski project, I was the leader of a study in which we examined how monolingual and bilingual children develop vocabulary. We used the Polish and Norwegian versions of the CLTs. Analyses of the data collected in the part of the project for which I was responsible will make it possible to determine what scores on the CLT are typical for children of a certain age, how these scores differ between Polish- and Norwegian-speaking children, and what factors related to the children (e.g., time of exposure to languages), and to words (e.g., age of word acquisition or whether the word is a cognate) affect scores on the CLT.
The project was funded by National Science Centre, carried out by MultiLADA, and project's PIs were prof. Ewa Haman and prof. Nina Gram Garmann. More about PolkaNorski: here.
As a researcher and later a PhD student at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, I was involved in a series of projects on the neural basis of developmental dyslexia. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and various cognitive tasks to find out what deficits - such as phonological and those related to rapid automatic naming - might be present in children with developmental dyslexia. The longitudinal studies we conducted allowed us to observe learning-related changes in brain functioning during phonological, reading or letter-to-sound matching tasks in typically developing children and children with dyslexia. The results of the projects were described in a series of publications, including: Dębska & Łuniewska et al., 2021, Łuniewska et al., 2018, Łuniewska et al., 2019, Beck et al., 2024, Wójcik et al., 2024, Chyl et al., 2023, Chyl et al., 2021, Dębska et al., 2021, Dynak et al., 2021, Dębska et al., 2019, Chyl et al., 2018a, Chyl et al., 2018b, Dębska et al., 2016.
The projects were funded by National Science Centre, carried out in the Laboratory of Language Neurobiology, and headed by prof. Katarzyna Jednoróg and prof. Anna Grabowska.
At the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, I led a project to verify whether reading difficulties in children with developmental dyslexia could be due to the phenomenon of visual crowding, whereby stimuli (letters) presented close to other stimuli (other letters in a word) are more difficult to recognize than the same stimuli presented individually. In the study, I assessed reading skills and used eye-tracking techniques to analyze reading behavior in typical readers and children with dyslexia. The results of the project showed that text spacing - that is, increasing the spacing between letters and words in a text, reducing the effect of visual crowding - equally improves reading in dyslexic children and typically developing children. The results of the project are described in the publication Łuniewska et al.., 2022.
The project I led was funded by National Science Centre, carried out in the Laboratory of Language Neurobiology, and supervised by prof. Katarzyna Jednoróg.
In a project implemented by the Educational Research Institute and SWPS University, we created a battery of tools to assess the cognitive functioning of children and adolescents aged 3 months to 25 years. The battery of tests was developed in a way that takes into account the diverse educational needs of children and adolescents, including the needs of those with experience of migration, intellectual disabilities, visual or hearing dysfunction, language disorders, learning disorders, ADHD or autism spectrum disorders, but also the needs of those with above-average cognitive potential. My role in the project was to provide psychometric consultation, conduct data analysis and develop norms for some of the tests in the battery. The developed battery of tests was awarded the Prize of the Minister of Education and Higher Education for Outstanding Implementation Achievement in 2024. The project was headed on the IBE side by Prof. Grażyna Krasowicz-Kupis, and on the SWPS side by Prof. Grzegorz Sędek.
Morę about the project (in Polish): here.
In the StarWords project, we created a mobile application in which parents conducted a kind of speech log of their children. Thanks to the data collected in the project, we will learn at what age monolingual and bilingual children reach milestones in language development. Currently in the project, I am responsible for analyzing the characteristics of the first words reported by parents.
The project was funded by National Science Centre, carried out by MultiLADA, and project's PIs was prof. Ewa Haman and the post-doc in the project (main investigator) was Karolina Muszyńska. More about StarWords: here.
In 2015-2024, I taught at the University of Warsaw such subjects as:
I teach courses on what I know best, including:
I conduct student internships, group research projects, seminars and theses (undergraduate, master's, and doctoral) in psychology and cognitive science.