Professor Cécile De Cat

Profile

My PhD and subsequent postdoc (both at the University of York and funded by the ESRC) investigated the syntax, interpretaton and acquisition of dislocations in French.  I joined the University of Leeds as lecturer (2004), and was promoted to senior lecturer (2008) and then Professor of Linguistics (2015), a title which reflects my active interest in many areas of this fascinating discipline. For 7 years, I was director of Language@Leeds, a cross-faculty hub fostering interdisciplinary approaches to language.  Since 2018, I have been Speech and Language lead at the Centre for Applied Education Research in Bradford. Between 2019 and 2024, I was adjunct professor at the Arctic University of Norway. 

I'm originally a formal linguist, interested in the interplay between language components, especially in children. A running theme in my research is pragmatic competence, broadly defined as information packaging and meaning enrichment. My current research has a strong applied focus, and seeks to understand the causes and manifestations of individual differences in language development, language maintenance and language outcomes, in monolingual and bilingual children and adolescents. I’m also currently involved in various projects focusing on language complexity: how it develops in young children and how it is handled by adolescents.

I’m always interested to develop new interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaborations. Some examples of projects I’ve led or otherwise been involved in are listed below. I welcome PhD applications in any of those areas. 

Responsibilities

• Speech & Language lead (Centre for Applied Education Research)

Research interests

Please see my personal website for more information on the research interests and illustrative projects listed below. 

• Individual differences in language development (due to environmental and cognitive factors) and language maintenance (in heritage bilinguals) – Key projects include:
  • Q-BEx: an international collaboration which led to the creation of a customisable, online tool to quantify bilingual experience (PI; funded by the ESRC 2019-2023 and HaBilNet 2023-2026)
  • Multilingual Minds and Factors Affecting Multilingual Outcomes: an experimental study on language acquisition and language attrition in heritage speakers of Bosnian and Serbia living in Norway (CoI; funded by UiT the Arctic University of Norway 2020-2024)
  • Assessing core language skills at the beginning of secondary school in the Born-in-Bradford cohort (PI; funded by the Centre for Applied Education Research 2020-2022)
• Justice through language
  •  Justice to Youth Language Needs: a European network funded by COST (2024-2027) to tackle language difficulties as a hidden source of inequalities for young people facing the youth justice system. The project aims to inform and influence policy-making and practice.
• Cross-linguistic influences in advanced L2 speakers – Key projects include:
  • Noun-noun compound processing in advanced L2 speakers of English (PI; funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute and the AHRC 2014)
  • Interpretation of novel noun-noun compounds by native and advanced non-native speakers of English (pilot ongoing) 
• Information structure (e.g. topic, focus, root properties) and pragmatic competence – Key projects include:
  • The emergence of syntactic complexity: First language acquisition of cleft sentences as a window onto the syntax-prosody-information structure interface (CoI; funded by the FWO 2024-2027)
  • Referential communication and executive function skills in bilingual children (PI; funded by the Leverhulme Trust 2012-2015)
  • Early discourse competence in preschool children: An elicitation study (PI; funded by the AHRC 2006-2007)
• Experimental syntax – I have supervised various PhD theses using that approach, including for example:
  • with Joseph Mwansa (2011): the first language acquisition of object markers in Bemba
  • with Valentina Brunetto (2012): the acquisition of pronoun interpretation in Italian complex predicates
  • with Mengling Xu (2017): The processing of simple reflexive ‘ziji’ by English learners of Chinese
  • with Asma Alghamdi (2021): Resumptive pronouns in Baha Arabic
  • with Chen Yang (2025): Similarity-based interference in the processing of relative clauses in English and Mandarin Chinese
• 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)
• Member of the IASCL
• Member of the LAGB

Student education

I normally teach modules in data science and language acquisition, and supervise UG and MA dissertations. 

Research groups and institutes

• Language acquisition
• Language pedagogy
• Language processing
• Linguistics and Phonetics
• Formal Linguistics
• Multilingualism
• Language at Leeds

Current postgraduate researchers

• Gadah Almishwat