Radim Lacina, Ph.D.

About me

I study how our minds process language. My research interests lie in sentence and discourse comprehension, and experimental pragmatics. 

I'm an Assistant Professor at the Department of Czech Language of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. I am responsible for teaching courses on psycholinguistics and pragmatics as well as convening the Introduction to the Study of Linguistics course. I also co-organise The Roman Jakobson Linguistic Seminar, a departmental invited speaker lecture series.

Since July 2025, I have also been employed as a Researcher in the LangInLife project (OP JAK programme, EU structural funds) at the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages looking at linguistic illusions in Czech working with Mojmír Dočekal. 

In January 2026, I started working as the Leader or the Linguistic Team on the REVERSED project led by Hynek Cígler at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Studies. The project aims to incorporate insights from semantics and pragmatics into the domain of psychometrics, specifically the issue of reverse-keyed (negated) items in psychological questionnaires.

In September 2027, I will start my MSCA-PF fellowship with the ProSync project at Masaryk University with Pavel Caha as the main supervisor and a secondment at Utrecht University with Jakub Dotlačil. The project will focus on synthesising insights from morphological theory (nanosyntax) with computational modelling and experimentation to explain the role of syncretism in the emergence of agreement attraction effects in Slavic.

I'm also an Associate Member of the ERCEL Lab at Charles University, Prague.

Education

I obtained my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Osnabrück University in 2025 under the supervision of Nicole Gotzner and Matthew Husband (secondary). In Osnabrück, I worked as a Research Associate at the SPA Lab between 2021 and 2024 (between 2021 and 2022 the lab was based at the University of Potsdam). 

I have an M.Sc. in the Psychology of Language from the University of Edinburgh (2020), where I worked under Patrick Sturt. I gained my B.A. in Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics from the University of Oxford (St Hugh's College) in 2019. For my BA thesis in linguistics, I was supervised by Matthew Husband. 

I founded and co-organised The Friday Primes, an informal discussion group for young researchers in psycholinguistics based in Berlin and Potsdam between 2022 to 2024.