Prof Cécile De Cat
- Position: Professor of Linguistics
- Areas of expertise: Language acquisition (first, bilingual, second); second language processing; information structure an its interaction with syntax; corpus-based and experimental studies; statistical modelling
- Email: C.DeCat@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 3555
- Location: B22 Michael Sadler
- Website: Cecile's personal website | Googlescholar | Researchgate | ORCID
Profile
My undergraduate degree was a Licence en Philologie Romane at the Belgian UCL (Louvain-la-Neuve). After coming to the UK as a French assistant in a Durham school (thanks to a European exchange programme), I got an MA in Linguistics from the University of Durham, and then worked as a research assistant on a language acquisition project at the University of York. I moved on to do a PhD in language acquisition (funded by the ESRC) at the University of York. After an ESRC-funded post-doc also at the University of York, I was appointed to the University of Leeds as a lecturer. I have been Professor of Linguistics since 2015. I am currently also Professor II at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT) in Tromsø https://uit.no/research/acqva and I lead the Speech and Language action project group at the Centre for Applied Education Research
Responsibilities
- Speech & Language lead (Centre for Applied Education Research)
Research interests
Please see Cecile's personal website for research interests, projects and publications.
My research focuses on the following themes:
- Individual differences in language development (due to environmental and cognitive factors) and language maintenance (in heritage bilinguals)
- Cross-linguistic influences in advanced L2 speakers
- Information structure (e.g. topic, focus, root properties) and discourse competence
- Experimental syntax
- I have a keen interest in data science, including data visualisation using R. Related research topics include:
- quantifying bilingual experience and
- evaluating critical thresholds objectively.
- Co-creating guidelines for the use Q-BEx for language screening
- Early discourse competence in preschool children: An elicitation study
- LITE Excellence and Innovation fellowship
- New statistical methods to analyse psycholinguistic data
- Quantifying bilingual language experience: Optimising tools for educators, clinicians and researchers
- Referential communication and executive function skills in bilingual children
- The Bantu-Romance connection
Professional memberships
- Editorial board member for the Journal of Child Language
- Editorial board member for the Studies in Bilingualism (SiBil) series (Benjamins)
- Action Project lead for Speech and Language at the Centre for Applied Education Research
- Member of the LAGB
- Member of the IASCL
Student education
I normally teach modules in language acquisition and formal linguistics, and supervise UG and MA dissertations. From 2024-25 I will start offering a module on Data Science for Linguists.
Research groups and institutes
- Language acquisition
- Language pedagogy
- Language processing
- Linguistics and Phonetics
- Formal Linguistics
- Multilingualism
- Language at Leeds