Research

What research is CAT engaged in?

We’re engaged in all kinds of research activities pertaining to first and second language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual typically developing and language-impaired children aged anything from around 2 to 7, but we’re also now investigating older children and teenagers for particular aspects of language; in addition, we currently starting to explore very early language development in infants and toddlers.

Quite a mouthful? The following summarizes the overall CAT research objectives and the table below describes some of the current investigations in more detail.

  • first language acquisition of Cypriot Greek by monolingual typically developing children
  • first language acquisition of Cypriot Greek by children with language impairment
  • (first or second) language acquisition by bilingual and multilingual children
  • second language acquisition by children, adolescents, and adults alike
  • developmental differences between Cypriot and Standard Greek

Some of the particular topics we have worked on in the past are listed here alongside the experimental participant groups and tools used:

Topic Group Tools
Aspect L2 Greek/Cypriot by L1 Russian/Georgian speakers (adolescents and adults) • sentence completion task (written)
• video stimuli (oral)
Clitics L1 (Cypriot) Greek by mono- and bilingual children with TLD and SLI, also Hellenic Greeks and Binationals (all ages and stages starting from 2 to adulthood) • sentence completion task (tool from COST A33)
• spontaneous speech (corpora in progress)
Lightverbhood L1 Cypriot with TLD and SLI (different ages) • sentence completion task for lexical and light verbs (plus other data to be used such as spontaneous speech)
Narratives L1 Cypriot with TLD and SLI (different ages) • retelling: Renfrew Bus Story Test, Cinderella Story and others
• story-telling (in preparation)
Non-Word Repetition L1 Cypriot with TLD and SLI (different ages) [tasks to be added]
Present Perfect L2 English by Greek Cypriots and Hellenic Greeks (middle and high school pupils) [tasks to be added]
Quantifiers L1 Cypriot with TLD and SLI (different ages) [tasks to be added]
Relative Clauses L1 Cypriot with TLD and SLI (different ages) [tasks to be added]
Scalar Implicatures L1 Cypriot with TLD and SLI (different ages) [tasks to be added]
Tense L1 Cypriot with TLD (5-year-olds) • audiovisual stimuli elicitation task (tool from COST A33)
Wh-Questions L1 Cypriot with TLD (different ages) [tasks to be added]
Clefts L1 Cypriot with TLD (different ages) [tasks to be added]

Please also visit the page detailing all CAT output here (soon with downloadable papers, handouts, presentations, and more).


Website theme adapted for the Cyprus Acquisition Team by dkr, based on foundation-default-colours (license) by Kenton Hamaluik.