What are the activities in and by CAT?
We have a number of different CAT Meetings, the core of our activities involves CAT Research, and we also organize CAT Events — we're now integrating a calendar function in our CATendar.
CAT Meetings
The Cyprus Acquisition Team meets regularly. Anyone is welcome to join! Whether you are a student, a professional, a researcher, an academic faculty member, or perhaps a concerned parent, and whether you live in Cyprus or just visit — if you're interested, please get in touch! There is no requirement to attend CAT Meetings regularly.
You find the current schedule of CAT Meetings here. With the fall 2011 semester, we split our meeting activities largely into CAT Lectures and WG Meetings, in 2013 we started the CAT–CAT lecture series, and as of the spring semester 2014, we offer RMED meetings for students interested in getting involved in CAT.
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 major way, and most of the researchers affiliated with CAT carry out research without their own funding. We are actively looking for donations and would be happy to discuss funding support strategies. If you're interested in helping out, please get in touch with Dr Kleanthes Grohmann.
CAT explores language acquisition and development, with emphasis on English, Greek, and Russian. At this time, our research extends to first and second language acquisition in monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual typically developing and language-impaired children aged 2 to 7, but we're also investigating older children and teenagers for particular aspects of language; in addition, we are currently starting to explore very early language development in infants and toddlers. More information can be found on our CAT Research page.
Past funded research activities included the UCY-funded Gen-CHILD Project and the RPF-funded CySLI Project. Our working groups are listed on the CAT WGs page. We're currently exploring vocabulary and early grammar development in infants and toddlers (LexiKyp Project) and grammatical abilities in children with Down Syndrome (CG-DS MorphoSyntax Project).
Please also visit the page detailing all CAT output here (soon with downloadable papers, 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.
- FROM FALL 2013 ON: CAT–CAT Lecture Series (UCY Lecture Hall or CAT Lab, Nicosia)
- CANCELED!
SHORT-TERM VISITOR TWO-DAY WORKSHOP: Sentence Processing in Children with Specific Language Impairment vs. Sequential Bilingual Children(by Prof Theo Marinis, University of Reading)
December 17–18, 2012 (CAT Lab, Nicosia; bigger room alternative if necessary as indicated) - CANCELED!
SHORT-TERM VISITOR MINI-LECTURE SERIES: Thinking Biolinguistics(by Prof Cedric Boeckx, ICREA & University of Barcelona)
December 11–14, 2012 (CAT Lab, Nicosia; bigger room alternative if necessary as indicated) - CAT Lecture: Morpho-syntactic Illusions in Cypriot-Greek Down Syndrome: The Development of Tense and S/V Agreement (by Dr Christiana Christodoulou, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences)
June 13, 2012 (CAT Lab, Nicosia) - CAT–biSLI STSM Lecture: Procedural Functions in SLI: Sequence Learning, Motor Organization,
Working Memory and Executive Functions (by Dr Ágnes Lukács, Budapest University of Technology and Economics)
May 23, 2012 (CAT Lab, Nicosia) - CAT–biSLI STSM Tutorial: Executive Functions, Working Memory and Their Relationships to Language in SLI (by Dr Ágnes Lukács, Budapest University of Technology and Economics)
May 21, 2012 (CAT Lab, Nicosia) - 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:
- Language Disorders in Greek 5 (international conference)
May 30–31, 2014 (Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol) - Three Factors and Beyond: The Socio-Syntax of (A)typical Language Acquisition and Development (international conference)
November 16–18, 2012 (Classic Hotel, Old Town, Nicosia) - CYCL1A Workshop on the Acquisition of Clitics (project conference)
May 25–26, 2012 (Royiatiko Hotel, Old Town, Nicosia) - COST Action IS0804 Meeting (research network meeting)
October 27–29, 2010 (Flamingo Beach Hotel, Larnaca) - Language Disorders in Greek 3: Language Disorders and Bilingualism (international conference)
June 12–13, 2010 (European University Cyprus, Nicosia) - LOT 1: Linguists of Tomorrow (postgraduate student conference)
May 7–8, 2010 (University of Cyprus, Nicosia)
More CAT activities will be added shortly, but here's a first improvement — our CATendar [NOT UPDATED RECENTLY…]: