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).