School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Academic & Teaching staff
Dr Catherine Davies
Teaching Fellow
Interests in first language acquisition, developmental pragmatics, experimental pragmatics and psycholinguistics. Catherine is not currently available for research postgraduate supervision.
Catherine's research investigates how child and adult language users integrate information from communicative contexts in order to give appropriate amounts of information in conversation, and how deviation from such expectations conveys subtle pragmatic meaning. In addition to language processing and acquisition by neurotypicals, she is interested in the interplay of language impairment and abnormalities in social cognition.
Catherine is currently involved in two collaborative research projects funded by EURO-XPRAG and the European Science Foundation. The first investigates children's comprehension of apparently irrelevant and under-informative utterances, with Tiffany Morisseau of Université Lyon 1, France and Danielle Matthews, University of Sheffield. The second is entitled 'Pragmatics, the autistic spectrum and language impairment: Sensitivity to quantity maxims in ASDs and LI' and is a collaboration with Courtenay Frazier Norbury of Royal Holloway, University of London, and Clara Andres Roqueta, Universitat Jaume I de Castellon, Spain.