Academic & Teaching staff

Dr Cécile De Cat

Senior Lecturer and Director of Linguistics & Phonetics

Dr Cécile De Cat

(On research leave from end of January to August 2012.)

Interests in language acquisition; syntax; information structure and formal pragmatics; Romance languages, (especially French and Spanish), and similarities between Romance and Bantu languages. Cécile is happy to consider applications for postgraduate research in any of these areas.

Previous PhD students:
  • Sabina Grahek: Argument structure in Slovene (External examiner: Prof. Anna Siwierska)
  • Joseph Mwansa: The Acquisition of Object Markers by Bemba speaking Children (External examiner: Prof. Katherine Demuth)
  • Peerapat Yangklang: L2 acquisition of epistemic modality in English by L1 Thai-speaking children and adults (External examiner: Prof. Roumyana Slabakova)

Current PhD students:

  • Valentina Brunetto (working on the acquisition of object clitics by Italian monolinguals)
  • Shivan Toma (working on the acquisition of A-bar dependencies by Behdini speakers of English)

Own research: 

Cécile is currently involved in an EEG study of the processing of noun-noun compounds by second language learners, in collaboration with Dr. Ekaterini Klepousniotou (Institute of Psychologocial Sciences) and with the help of Natasha Rust and Kremena Koleva. 

She is also working on a project aiming to investigate how to best capture root properties in grammar.  This work was presented at a dedicated workshop at the Societas Linguisticas Europeas conference in September (Logroño, Spain) and will appear in two specialist volumes.

Other current interests include the relationship between referential choice and executive function in monolingual and bilingual pre-schoolers (in collaboration with Dr. Ludovica Serratrice from the University of Manchester), and the cognitive impact of mastering and using a second language (an undergraduate research project conducted by Laura Boehm and supervised by Cécile). 

Cécile's monograph French Dislocation has recently been issued in paperback by Oxford University Press.

Detailed website:

For a list of publications, current and past projects, please see Cécile's personal website