What are the activities in and by CAT?
CAT Meetings
The Cyprus Acquisition Team meets as a group around once a week. Anyone is welcome to join! Whether you are a student, a professional, a researcher, a professor, or perhaps a concerned parent, and whether you live in Cyprus or just visit — if you're interested, come by! There is no requirement to attend CAT Meetings regularly.
You find the current schedule of CAT Meetings here. (Details on previous semesters can be viewed here, but that informationwill be integrated into this site shortly.)
CAT Research
The Cyprus Acquisition Team originally started out by undertaking a lot of unfunded research, and unfortunately this continues into the present: CAT itself is not yet financially supported in any way, and most of the researchers affiliated with CAT carry out their research without funding. The research funding situation in Cyprus is dire, with the sole national funding agency being in complete disarray. As of today, we have several project proposal with them awaiting assessment (since summer 2009!). We are actively looking for donations and would be happy to discuss alternative funding/support strategies. If you're interested in helping out, please get in touch with Dr Kleanthes Grohmann.
At this time, our research extends to first language acquisition of Cypriot Greek by monolingual Greek-Cypriot children aged 2 years and over on a number of lexical and morpho-syntactic aspects of the language, and we're currently expanding to bilingual and language-impaired populations as well as other multi-lingual factors (second language acquisition, all kinds of language pairs found in Cyprus). (See here for more.)
Since April 2010, we receive some research support through the UCY-funded Gen-CHILD Project. As of July 2011, we're also working on an RPF-funded research project on SLI in Greek Cypriot children, the CySLI Project. With the fall 2011 semester, we wplit our meeting activities largely into CAT Lectures and WG Meetings, both scheduled on the CAT Meetings page. Our working groups are listed on the CAT WGs page.
Please also visit the page detailing all CAT output here (soon with downloadable papers, handouts, presentations, and more).
CAT Events
From time to time, we organize events beyond our regular CAT Meetings and other activities. These will be compiled here.
- Statistics Tutorial: Statistics Bootcamp — R for Linguists (by Prof. Stefan Th. Gries, University of California, Santa Barbara)
June 6–9, 2011 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia) - CAT Erasmus Tutorial: Analyses of Child-Directed Speech (by Dr Sonja Eisenbeiss, University of Essex)
June 1, 2011 (CAT Lair, Nicosia) - CAT Erasmus Lecture: The Acquisition of Noun-Phrase Internal Agreement in German and Kuwaiti Arabic Child Language (by Dr Sonja Eisenbeiss with Shorouq Al-Houti, University of Essex)
May 31, 2011 (CAT Lair, Nicosia) - CAT Lecture: Dialogue Is Collaborative: How Our Conversational Partners Influence How We Think and Speak (by Dr Alexia Galati, UCY)
April 14, 2011 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia) - Conference Preparation Talk: Results of a Magnitude Estimation Test for Cypriot Greek Clitics (by Dr Panos Pappas, Simon Fraser University)
April 12, 2011 (CAT Lair, Nicosia) - CAT Lecture: Wh-Clefting in Cypriot Greek (by Antri Kaniklii, University of York & CAT)
March 21, 2011 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia) - CAT Lecture: Gavagai! — Or Constraint-Guided Learning During Lexical Development (by Dr Loukia Taxitari, Universität Potsdam & CAT)
February 7, 2011 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia) - BISLI — The Cyprus Meeting (fall 2010 meeting of COST Action IS0804)
October 27–29, 2010 (Larnaca) - Erasmus Lecture: Acquisition of Prepositions in Greek (by Prof. Arhonto Terzi, TEI Patras)
June 15, 2010 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia) - Gen-CHILD Project: Clitics Group Special Meeting (with several LDG 3 participants)
June 14, 2010 (European University Cyprus, Nicosia) - Special Lecture: Grammar in Developmental Disorders: Evidence from Binding (by Dr Alex Perovic, University College London)
June 11, 2010 (European University Cyprus, Nicosia) - Erasmus Tutorial: Elicitation Games for Language Acquisition Research (by Dr Sonja Eisenbeiss, University of Essex)
May 10, 2010 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia) - GACL 4 — (Bio)linguistics Development: A Collection of CAT Studies (student-oriented workshop)
May 9, 2010 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia)
Other local events with heavy CAT involvement are these:
- LOT 1: Linguists of Tomorrow (postgraduate student conference)
May 7–8, 2010 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia) - Language Disorders in Greek 3: Language Disorders and Bilingualism (international conference)
June 12–13, 2010 (European University Cyprus, Nicosia)
More CAT activities will be added shortly, but here's a first improvement — our CATendar [NOT UPDATED RECENTLY…]: