TITLE: The Generic Masculine in Educational Communication ABSTRACT: The thesis deals with the use of generic masculine in educational communication. The use of masculine nouns to refer to a group of people of both sexes is a target of frequent criticism from proponents of gender-neutral language. The theoretical part of my paper discusses and explains in general the importance of language for cognitive development of an individual and the principle of gender-sensitive expression. The empirical part of my paper is based on qualitative research that was conducted at a selected secondary school in order to verify the influence of language attributions of the generic masculine form on the mental representation of reality. The main technique of data collection was a survey inspired by the psycholinguistics association experiments. Attitudes and opinions of students on the subject of research were identified during group discussions. The results of my study among respondents points at the generic masculine to be significantly more often associated with mental representation of a male than to be perceived as gender-neutral. These findings thus correspond with some of the current theses of gender linguistics.

Eva Richterová - Early reading skills development in children with specific language impairment This study investigated the development of early reading skills in children with specific language impairment within a psycholinguistic framework. The investigation is based on theories concerning linguistic and cognitive skills which play a crucial role in the development of reading skills. This approach is utilized to identify groups which are at risk of difficulties in literacy acquisition as a result of language impairment. Theoretical background of reading development in children with SLI is presented, in addition to current knowledge about the relationship between language and reading skills. Studies on SLI highlight the need of longitudinal investigations, which enable better understanding of the relationship between literacy development and preliteracy skills. The aim of the study was to provide a systematic description of the reading skills development in children with SLI from first to fourth Grade. A group of 25 children with SLI was repeatedly investigated in terms of their reading skills (decoding and reading comprehension) and preliteracy skills. Assessment of language and cognitive skills was also carried out and involved phonological awareness, rapid authomatised naming, and letter...

This work deals with possible interferences in gender conceptualization of inanimate objects in bilingual speakers of Hungarian and Slovakian language. It closely pursues the grammatical category of gender (which is present in one of the examined languages, in Slovakian, and absent in the other one - Hungarian). The aim of the performed experiment, in which two groups of speakers participated (one was the previously mentioned group of bilingual speakers of Hungarian and Slovakian, and the second one was a control group of Hungarian monolingual speakers) was to verify if the presence of grammatical gender in one of the two languages, spoken by the bilingual group of speakers, will affect their conceptualization of gender of the inanimate referents. Another aspiration was to find out if bilingual speakers, as well as the monolingual speakers of Hungarian had accordant responses to some of the inanimate objects, and also if there was a congruence in the responses between the two participating groups of speakers. A secondary aim of this experiment was to examine a phenomenon, which appeared in the previous conducted research (Červenková, 2017), which was the effort of the respondents to make the first phoneme of their response identical with the first phoneme of the name of particular object in...

The present diploma thesis focuses on the unconscious code-switching between second and third language. The main objective of this thesis is to deal with principles of unconscious code-switching, describe and categorize actual appearances of unconscious code-switching between second and third language. After introducing issues, the second chapter sums up the way of second and third language acquisition in terms of bilingualism and multilingualism. The third chapter presents a definition and theoretic bases of code-switching. The fourth chapter concerns the analysis of the reason for code- switching in terms of usage-based and psycholinguistic approaches. The fifth chapter presents a categorization of code-switching from syntactic and pragmatic perspectives. The sixth chapter concerns the analysis of cases of code-switching from recorded interviews and the explanation of possible factors causing unconscious code-switching. Key words: Unconscious code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, usage-based approach, psycholinguistic approach, function words, acquisition, second language, third language, WIPP