Pavlína Heinzová

Dr. Pavlina Heinzova is part of the Minority Issues in the Denmark-Germany Border Region Cluster, where she collaborates with Dr. Ruth Kircher on the intergenerational transmission of Frisian and intergroup relations in the border region. Her current research interests include multilingualism, minority language acquisition, and minority language use, among others. Through her research, she aims to contribute to a better understanding of both universal and context-specific factors that support minority language use, as well as conditions that hinder intergenerational language transmission and language revitalization.

Before joining the ECMI, Pavlina worked as a lecturer in the Neuropsychology and Education Master’s program at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and as a researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language (BCBL, Spain). In December 2023, she obtained her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of the Basque Country (UPV, Spain), supported by the Basque Government. In her PhD thesis, Pavlina focused on distinct speech processes across the minority and majority languages of Basque-Spanish neurotypical bilinguals and bilingual speakers with aphasia. Her PhD work underscores the value and importance of cross-linguistic investigation, especially in understudied minority languages.

During her PhD, Pavlina also spent three months at the City University of New York (CUNY), where she conducted experimental research on bilingual speakers with aphasia. Her solid experimental foundation stems from two semesters in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Master’s program at the BCBL during her Erasmus stay. She holds a dual master’s degree in Linguistics and Philosophy and a dual bachelor’s degree in English Philology and Philosophy from Palacký University (UP), Czech Republic.