Our new project on the Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI for Cypriot Greek: Development in Toddlers, funded by the Leventis Foundation through the University of Cyprus, will be detailed here shortly. The funding period is for two years, starting in February 2014. Please stay tuned.

For now, please get in touch with Loukia Taxitari concerning the CDI Project.

The project Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI for Cypriot Greek: Development in Toddlers is funded by the Leventis Foundation through the University of Cyprus for a two-year period between 1st February 2014 to 31st January 2016. It is a collaboration between the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus, with Dr Georgios Floros and Dr Kleanthes Grohmann, and the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Cyprus University of Technology, with Dr Maria Kambanaros. The main researcher on the project is Dr Loukia Taxitari at the University of Cyprus. We simply refer to the project as the LexiKyp Project.

If you are interested in the study, please sign up here and we will contact you with more information on how to participate:
http://www.research.biolinguistics.eu/ChildDB/register.php?flg=1

Research
The LexiKyp Project investigates language development in children in Cyprus. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) is a long checklist addressed to parents of small children through which we ask targeted questions about their child’s language at different stages. Researchers of language and cognition in infants and young children worldwide have been using the CDI for over 20 years as a tool which allows them to obtain parental reports about individual children’s communicative development in order to establish norms at different ages, to tailor experimental investigations to children’s cognitive apparatus at different stages in development, and to also help identify atypically developing children.

For more information on the CDI, please visit its official website here:
http://mb-cdi.stanford.edu

You can also find norms for language development in different languages on the CLEX website following this link:
http://www.cdi-clex.org

The aim of the LexiKyp Project is to collect information from parents of children between 18 and 30 months, and to establish norms for language at different stages in development. In this project we are most interested in the learning of words, but also in how children put words together to form bigger chunks of speech (phrases or sentences). We also study how children change the form of words, i.e. grammar, in order to talk about different things in the world, such as present, past, or future events, singular vs. plural objects, aspects of comparisons, and much more.

The collected data and the analysis of the studies are expected to provide a number of benefits. On the one hand, a Cypriot adaptation of the CDI will open a number of new, exciting research possibilities on the island providing researchers with the necessary tool for conducting studies with very young children for both typical and atypical language development, while at the same time it is expected to provide international research on cognitive development with important insights into the manner in which bilectal children growing up in diglossic communities develop.

People
The research team of the LexiKyp Project includes the project coordinator Dr Georgios Floros and Dr Kleanthes Grohmann from the University of Cyprus, Dr Maria Kambanaros from the Cyprus University of Technology, as well as Dr Loukia Taxitari from the University of Cyprus.

George Floros is Associate Professor of Translation Studies and Chair of the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus. He received his PhD in Translation Theory and Applied Linguistics in 2001 from Saarland University in Saarbrücken (Germany). His research interests include culture and translation, terminology, text linguistics, and the use of translation in language teaching. He has published, among others, a monograph on cultural constellations in texts and has co-edited a volume on Translation in Language Teaching and Assessment with Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Contact: gfloros@ucy.ac.cy

Kleanthes K. Grohmann is Associate Professor of Biolinguistics in the Department of English Studies and Vice-Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of Cyprus. He received his PhD in Linguistics in 2000 from the University of Maryland, College Park (USA). He has published the monograph Prolific Domains: On the Anti-Locality of Movement Dependencies (John Benjamins, 2003), co-authored the textbook Understanding Minimalism (with Norbert Hornstein and Jairo Nunes, CUP, 2005), and edited a large number of volumes (appearing with OUP, de Gruyter, and others) and special issues (for Linguistic Analysis, Lingua, and Linguistic Variation), some in collaboration, most recently the Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics (with Cedric Boeckx, CUP, 2013). He has published widely in linguistics journals and contributed chapters to collected volumes. He is the founding editor of the open access journal Biolinguistics and co-editor of the book series Language Faculty and Beyond. 
Contact: mailto:kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy

Maria Kambanaros is Associate Professor of Speech Pathology, Multilingualism, and Language Disorders and Chair of the newly founded Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Cyprus University of Technology. She received her PhD in Speech Pathology in 2004 from the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology in the Medical School of Flinders University in Adelaide (Australia). She has published the textbook Diagnostic Issues in Speech Therapy (in Greek), a university textbook adopted as the standard text in Speech and Language Therapy programs in Greece and Cyprus, of which over 2,800 copies have been sold to date (Athens: Ellin Publishing Co., 2007) and translated two SLT textbooks into Greek that are also being used widely. She has published widely in speech–language pathology, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics journals and contributed chapters to collected volumes.
Contact: maria.kambanaros@cut.ac.cy

Drs Grohmann and Kambanaros have worked together for several years and published extensively. They are jointly in charge of the Cyprus Acquisition Team (http://research.biolinguistics.eu/CAT), for which Dr. Grohmann serves as the founding director and Dr. Kambanaros as the clinical assessor and therapist.

Dr Loukia Taxitari, Special Scientist in the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus, is the main researcher on the project. She carries out all research activities in relation to the project. She holds a BA in Greek Philology from the University of Athens (2002), an MPhil in General Linguistics from the University of Oxford (2004), and a DPhil in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford (2009). Her research interests fall within language acquisition and psycholinguistics.
Contact: taxitari@ucy.ac.cy

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