GALA 2025 plenary talk

 I was deeply honoured to be invited to deliver one of the keynote presentations at the 17th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 2025) in Tours. 

Reflections on syntactic complexity, through the lens of adolescent language

This study examines syntactic complexity conceptualised as difficulty experienced by individual language users. It focuses on early adolescence: a stage where core syntax is assumed to be acquired, but there remains an effect of difficulty associated with syntactic complexity. I start by addressing three questions: (1) How is syntactic complexity defined within a generativist perspective? (2) How is it operationalised in language acquisition research? (3) To what extent can the effect of narrow syntax be disentangled from processing effects? I argue that Phase-based complexity (as defined in the Minimalist framework) could help us answer the third question.

The main part of the talk reports on a novel investigation of syntactic complexity effects in young adolescents from socio-economically disadvantaged communities in the UK. Performance was assessed across three complementary tasks: sentence repetition (LITMUS SR), narrative production (LITMUS MAIN), and a purpose-designed reading comprehension task (ARCA). Results reveal substantial inter-individual variability across all three tasks, challenging assumptions about homogeneous syntactic competence in this age group.

The analysis focuses on complexity at the clausal level and on the distinction between phasal and non-phasal subordination. I argue that difficulty patterns in sentence repetition primarily reflect processing capacity constraints rather than core syntactic deficits. In narrative production, distribution patterns of clausal subordination are shown to correlate with lexical diversity, morphosyntactic abilities, and reading comprehension abilities (indexed by the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension). I argue the syntactic complexity of narratives is a manifestation of strategic information management and of the sophistication of discourse representations. The reading comprehension data (from the ARCA) reveal that while figurative language constitutes a more substantial comprehension barrier than syntactic complexity per se, complex syntactic structures can impede the successful interpretation of non-literal meaning when these factors co-occur.

The findings converge on the conclusion that, at adolescence, syntactic complexity functions as a proxy measure for language-mediated information processing demands. This is consistent with the central tenet of the generative approach, according to which narrow syntax is inherently economical. 

Justice To Youth Language Needs: Human rights undermined by an invisible disadvantage

Language difficulties can be a hidden source of inequalities for young people facing the youth justice system.   youthjusticelanguage.org is a European network funded by COST to bring this to light and inform and influence policy-making and practice. I'm grateful to be part of this important project. 

Key findings from the AcqVA Aurora project on individual differences in language outcomes in contexts of immigration

This project investigates language acquisition and language attrition in speakers of Bosnian and Serbia living in Norway. It seeks to unveil how individual difference factors predict language outcomes. The original title of the project is: "MultiLingual Minds and Factors Affecting MultiLingual Outcomes". It was funded by UiT the Arctic University of Norway, from 2020 to 2024.  Investigators: Aleksandra Tomić, Yulia Rodina, Fatih Bayram, Cécile De Cat.

We created the HeLEx questionnaire to document bilingual language experience in Heritage Speakers, based on an adapted and augmented version of the LSBQ.  See our publication Documenting heritage language experience using questionnaires, where we compare the two and discuss the impact of methodological choices regarding question phrasing, visual format, response options, and response mechanisms. The HeLEx is available on Gorilla (link to be posted soon). 

Our study investigated the individual variation in language outcomes in speakers of Bosnian or Serbian who had emigrated to Norway in childhood or adulthood, or who were born there to immigrant parents.  We carried out three studies in adult speakers (n=71), each probing a different aspect of language outcomes: (i) the knowledge of clitic placement, (ii) morphosyntactic competence, and (iii) lexical competence. We also probed (iv) the knowledge of clitic placement in children, using an elicitation task. 

Knowledge of clitic placement: Our self-paced listening study demonstrates that P2 clitic placement in Bosnian and Serbian is vulnerable in bilingual speakers in contexts of immigration. The outcomes included a violation detection score and a listening/processing time difference between licit and illicit structures. Through causal inference modelling, we demonstrated that language background variables are part of a complex web of associations, and that seemingly age-related effects (such as the onset of exposure to Norwegian as the societal language, or the length of residence in Norway) are in fact proxies for key aspects of the quantity and quality of language experience. Literacy as reading practices was one of the most important factors promoting sensitivity to P2 violations as a metalinguistic measure, whereas the extent of HL use across contexts and later SL Exposure Onset boosted clitic position sensitivity in the processing measure. By contrast, length of residence in the SL country was not predictive of attrition. This suggests that heritage speakers and attrited speakers should be considered on a continuum rather than as distinct bilingualism profiles.  See our publication "Individual language experience factors in morphosyntactic variation in heritage and attriting speakers of Bosnian and Serbian: A causal inference approach". 

Children's production of direct objects: This elicited production study investigates the structural and morphological realization of direct objects—specifically noun phrases (NPs), clitic pronouns, and null objects—among child heritage speakers (HSs) of Bosnian and Serbian (ages 5–10) in contact with Norwegian. Objects were elicited in discourse settings where the referent was highly accessible (e.g., “What is Mia doing to the monkey?”). We utilized the Q-BEx questionnaire to document various aspects of the children's bilingual language experience, and the a test of narrative production (the LITMUS MAIN) to measure lexical proficiency.  The results demonstrate that child HSs are sensitive to discourse-pragmatic constraints, showing a distribution preference for clitics, followed by null objects and NPs. Statistical modeling reveals that individual language experience variables significantly modulate these realization preferences. We argue against a morphological deficiency account despite the observed increase in the rate of null objects. The potential vulnerability of the feminine clitic je is likely due to the complex morphosyntactic patterns inherent to the Bosnian and Serbian pronominal systems. See our publication “Direct objects in child heritage speakers of Bosnian and Serbian in Norway: Morphosyntax, pragmatics, and language experience”.

Watch this space for the outcomes of our other studies (in particular our creation of a new sentence repetition test in Bosnian and Serbian). 

A citizen science approach to the assessment of pragmatic language in adolescents

This pilot project will attempt to provide a proof of concept for a Citizen Science approach to better inform the assessment of pragmatic language in adolescents.  Pragmatic language is the ability to use and understand implicit meaning during social interaction. A number of standard tools exist to assess pragmatic language, but speech & language therapists find these tools inadequate for that age group, which seems to be characterised by very different ‘norms’ to other age groups. We will facilitate the creation of videos by young people from Bradford, on their experience of pragmatic language. This will inform a critical review of existing assessment tools, and lay the foundation for a larger-scale project. 

The pilot is funded by the University of Leeds' Cultural Institute. It is a collaboration between the University of Leeds, the University of Bradford, and political theatre company Common Wealth (Bradford and Cardiff).

Key findings from Q-BEx project

We have created a customisable online tool which researchers, speech & language therapists and teachers can use to better understand the language experiences and language background of bi/trilingual children, and to inform the professional evaluation of their language support needs. The tool’s design was informed by an international, cross-sector Delphi consensus survey (including representatives from 29 countries), the comprehensive review of existing tools, best practice identified in the psychometric literature, and consultation with bilingualism experts (research and practice). The tool consists of an online questionnaire and back-end calculator. The questionnaire can be customised according to professional users’ needs in terms of level of detail, type of respondent and language of administration, and is available in 23 languages, with 5 more to be added shortly (far exceeding our original target of 13).    The tool was validated using newly collected data from 299 children from 3 countries (France, the Netherlands, and UK), between the ages of 5 and 9. This includes data from the full questionnaire, as well as direct measures of proficiency in the societal language (French, Dutch, or English) and of relevant cognitive skills.     Exploiting advanced quantitative methods, we identified complex associations among the Individual Difference variables provided by the Q-BEx questionnaire, when considered as predictors of language proficiency. These associations indicate different types of profiles practitioners might encounter when assessing multilingual children.       We demonstrated the practical benefit of composite indices of Richness of Experience as predictors of language proficiency, and demonstrated how these indices share common and specific information among multilingual children’s societal vs home languages.     Using an information-theoretic approach, we identified the optimal level of questionnaire detail required to predict language outcomes in multilingual children (as represented in our validation sample).  This evidence will guide professional users to choose the level of detail to implement in the questionnaire, given their needs and constraints.     Risk for language impairment is incorporated into Q-BEx via a few simple questions about early language development and current oral skills in each language.  A Concern Score is derived to identify children likely to be at risk for language impairment. By recruiting some of the children in the validation sample from speech and language therapy clinics, we were able to demonstrate the usefulness of this Concern Score by how well it flagged independently-known-to-be-at-risk children, and by how well the Concern Score predicted language performance in the societal language in all the children flagged by that score.      The Concern Score is incorporated in the individual child reports automatically generated by the Q-BEx platform. These reports also include information about the child’s amount of experience in each language (current and cumulative), parental estimates of the child’s proficiency in each language, and indices of Richness of the child’s experience of each language. Evidence-informed guidance is provided for the interpretation of the reports.     The validation of the questionnaire also included a qualitative assessment, analysing the validation study data loss, inconsistencies in data, and identifying unlikely scenarios reported by respondents. We offer recommendations to optimise data accuracy and highlight challenges inherent to the collection of data via questionnaires. The data will be made openly available on the RADA repository once our remaining scientific papers have been accepted for publications. The preprints and R code will appear on the OSF.

Online versions of LITMUS tests

 As part of our Bradford-based project assessing language in pre-adolescents, we are developing online versions of three of the LITMUS tests (in English):

• sentence repetition (see the SRep website)
• quasi-universal non-word repetition (the NWR website is under development)
• Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (see the MAIN website)

We will make them available when they have been successfully piloted. 

The original tasks were created initially as part of the COST Action IS0804 'Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment' funded by the EU RTD Framework Programme.

MultiLingual Minds and Factors Affecting MultiLingual Outcomes

This project will systematically investigate individual language experience factors and their role in shaping variation in linguistic development and outcomes in multilingualism. Individual language experiences differ considerably in multilinguals, leading to performance and ultimate attainment variation in almost all domains of grammar across all modalities of testing (e.g. de Houwer 2007; Luk & Bialystok 2013; Sorace 2004). Multilingual outcomes are also shaped by social and contextual factors (e.g. Anderson, Mak, Chahi & Bialystok 2017; Bialystok & Luk 2013; Marian, Blumenfeld & Kaushanskaya 2007; Serratrice & De Cat 2019).  We will characterize and quantify multilingualism as a cumulation and continuum of individual experiences and investigate how much correlations between linguistic outcomes and individual language experiences differ for each language of the multilingual speaker, across age groups, domains of grammar, and modalities of testing.  By employing a semi-longitudinal methodological design with participants from age 4 to 50+, we will investigate the development and fluidity of multilingual systems, language maintenance, reduction or loss/attrition of language knowledge as well as the correlation between individual language experiences over time and individual linguistic outcomes. By looking at different language populations (simultaneous and sequential multilinguals), we will be able to tease apart the role of changes in language experience in causing delay, reduction, or loss of linguistic knowledge (e.g. Ammerlaan 1996; Köpke, Schmid, Keijzer & Dostert 2007; Paradis 2007; Schmid 2002; Schmid & Dusseldorp 2010). 

The collaboration includes PIs Fatih Bayram and Yulia Rodina, and PDRA Aleks Tomic. It is one of the four strands of the AcqVA Aurora project at the UiT, the Arctic University of Norway. 

Assessing core language skills in pre-adolescents in the Born-in-Bradford cohort

Between October 2020 and September 2022, we will be piloting a battery of tests to evaluate the language abilities of Year 7 pupils in Bradford schools.  This project is carried out in collaboration with Lydia Gunning (PDRA) and Katerina Klepousniotou (Co-I).  It is funded by the Centre for Applied Education Research, via the Opportunity Area (Priority 4). 

We will assess the core grammar skills, reading comprehension and narrative abilities of Year 7 pupils in Bradford. This will allow us to investigate the impact of deprivation and having English-as-Additional-Language on language outcomes, as a first step towards providing a benchmark to inform schools’ language assessment at the onset of KS3. We will compare different testing modalities (face-to-face online, face-to-face in person, or automatised online) and evaluate the impact of testing modality on pupils’ engagement and performance. 

Quantifying Bilingual Experience – optimising tools for educators, clinicians and researchers

A team including myself (PI), Sharon Unsworth, Philippe Prévost, Laurie Tuller, Ludovica Serratrice, Arief Gusnanto (all Co-Is) and Draško Kascelan (PDRA) has been awarded £735,374 for a three-year project starting on the 1st of October 2019. 

See the project website for details: https://q-bex.org/

This project aims to bring a step-change in the measurement of bilingual language experience. It will seek to establish an optimal metric informed by an in-depth review of existing tools and a consensus among researchers, speech & language therapists and educators on what aspects of language experience to index.

We aim to deliver user-friendly, online questionnaires (and their associated back-end calculators) to return measures of current and cumulative language experience in real time. The questionnaires will be available in 13 languages, and vary in length and level of detail: the shortest version will be useful when parental consultation is challenging; the longest version will yield more fine-grained measures to enable in-depth enquiries.

Reliability and cross-language validity of the tools we develop will be assessed using new data from 300 children in 3 different countries, in collaboration with an international team of experts. Based on this assessment, we will provide evidence-based guidance to inform users' choice on the level of questionnaire detail most appropriate to their needs.

Exploiting cutting-edge statistical techniques, we will also develop an objective method to identify early those bilingual children in need of support with their school language, helping practitioners estimate when a child with English as an Additional Language can be expected to have “caught up” with their monolingual peers.

Twitter: @QBExProject

Working memory correlates of second language learning: the effect of language experience, language proficiency, and culture

We compare the performance of Chinese learners of English and English learners of Chinese in verbal and visual working memory tasks and an attention task, and investigate the effect of language experience, proficiency in the second language, and culture.

Collaborators: Mengling Xu (University of Leeds) and Richard Allen (University of Leeds)

Noun-noun compound processing in a second language: an eye tracking study

Do the structural properties of the first language continue to influence the processing of the second language at very high levels of proficiency? In this study, we monitor pupil dilation and eye movements during the interpretation of English noun-noun compounds presented either in licit or reversed order (milk jug - jug milk) in a lexical decision task.

This research is done in collaboration with Harald Baayen (U of Tuebingen, Germany).

Referential communication and executive function skills in bilingual children

This is an experimental study of the relationship between executive function skills (cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control and working memory) and language experience in young bilingual children with unbalanced exposure to two languages, investigating these children's ability to make referential choices appropriate to their listener's information needs.

For more details as well as the main findings, see here.

This project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2012-633; £161K, 2012-2015).

Collaborators: Dr. Ludovica Serratrice (Co-I), Sanne Berends and Furzana Shah (RAs).

Outputs: (available from the links at the top of the page)

• De Cat, C. (2015) The cognitive underpinnings of referential abilities. In L. Serratrice & S. Allen (Eds.), The Acquisition of Reference. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• De Cat, C., Gusnanto, A., & Serratrice, L. (2018). Identifying a threshold for the executive function advantage in bilingual children. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263116000486 or main paper and supplementary material This paper won the Albert Valdman award for outstanding publication in SSLA for the year 2018 
• Serratrice, L. and De Cat, C. (2020) Individual differences in the production of referential expressions: the effect of language proficiency, language exposure and executive function in bilingual and monolingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 23(2): 371 - 386.  Doi: 10.1017/S1366728918000962 (Preprint available at: https://psyarxiv.com/w74zk/)
• De Cat, Cécile  (2021). Predicting language proficiency in bilingual children. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 42(2): 279-325. doi:10.1017/S0272263119000597 
• An on-line calculator of the Bilingual Profile Index (quantifying children's bilingual experience) (trial version) THIS HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED

Presentations:

• De Cat, C., Berends, S. and Serratrice, L. "Do all young bilingual children benefit from a cognitive advantage?" Paper presented at the International Congress for the Study of Child Language (Amsterdam, 16th of July 2014)
• De Cat, C. and Serratrice, L. "Referential communication in bilingual and monolingual children" (Invited talk at the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM), Reading, 26th of November 2014)
• De Cat, C., Berends, S. and Serratrice, L. "Are there executive function advantages for bilingual children?" Paper presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (Rutgers University, 23rd of May 2015)
• Serratrice, L. and De Cat, C. "Inhibitory control, WM and language proficiency in the referential choices of monolingual and bilingual children". Poster presented at BUCLD (Boston, November 2016).
• De Cat, C. and Serratrice, L. "The Bilingual Profile Index: a new, gradient measure of language experience". Poster presented at BUCLD (Boston, November 2016)
• Serratrice, L. and De Cat, C. "Bilingual children’s referential choices: The role of inhibitory control, working memory and language experience" Paper presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (Limerick, 14th of June 2017)
• De Cat, C. "Quantifying bilingual language experience: which measure best predicts proficiency?" Paper presented at EuroSLA (Muenster, September 2018)

Electrophysiological correlates of processing Noun-Noun compounds

This project investigates the processing of noun-noun compounds by very advanced learners of English, whose mothertongue features either the same word order (i.e. German) or the opposite word order (i.e. Spanish).  We recorded reaction times (Study 1) and Event-Related Potentials (Study 2) in a judgement-elicitation task.  State-of-the-art analysis using Mixed-Effects Modelling and Generalised Additive Modeling revealed clear word-order effects in non-native processing, even in trials with target-like performance.

This project has been Funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (University of Leeds) and by a British Academy Quantitative Skills Acquisition Award.

Collaborators: Dr. Ekaterini Klepousniotou (IPS, U of Leeds) and Prof. Harald Baayen (U of Tuebingen, Germany)

Occasional research Assistants: Natasha Rust, Raphael Morschett, Chris Norton, Kremena Koleva

Outputs to date:

• De Cat, C. and Klepousniotou, E. (2012) Residual indeterminacy in a core grammar phenomenon: evidence from the processing of Noun-Noun compounds.  Poster presented at GALANA (Kansas, October 2012).  (pdf)
• De Cat, C., Klepousniotou, E. & Baayen, R. H. (2014). Electrophysiological correlates of noun-noun compound processing by non-native speakers of English.  Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Stroudsburg, PA: ACL. (pdf)
• De Cat C, Klepousniotou E and Baayen H (2015). Representational deficit or processing effect? An electrophysiological study of noun-noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English. Frontiers in Psychology. 6:77. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00077
• Baayen, R. H., van Rij, J., De Cat, C. & Wood, S. (2017). Autocorrelated errors in experimental data in the language sciences: Some solutions offered by Generalized Additive Mixed Models. In Speelman, D., Heylen, K., and Geeraerts, D. (Eds.) Mixed Effects Regression Models in Linguistics. Berlin, Springer.  arXiv 1601.02043 [stat.AP]

Conference presentations:

• GALANA 2012
• CoLing 2014 (First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Compound Analysis)
• EuroSLA 2014

Capturing the exhaustivity effect in (French) clefts

Presented a paper at the workshop on clefts (Going Romance 2012), with George Tsoulas.  Title: "Towards a scalar implicature account of exhaustivity in clefts".  This project is currently dormant, but I'm hoping to revive it at some point.

Dislocated topics in hostile environments

This project is done in collaboration with Pilar Barbosa.  We are investigating the distribution of dislocated topics vs. canonical DP subjects in various wh-structures, in French.  Joe Rodd is assisting with the implementation of an on-line grammaticality judgement test based on audio stimuli.

The results have now been accepted for publication in Glossa, in a paper entitled "Intervention effects in wh-chains: the combined effect of syntax and processing"

Discourse competence of young children

In 2006-2007 I carried out an experimental project on the discourse competence of preschool children. This project demonstrated that the linguistic competence underlying the encoding of information is in place from at least 2;6 years of age. This includes the ability to identify and encode topics, and the use of definiteness and structural distinctions for reference establishment and maintenance. Children's 'errors' were shown to be caused by cognitive (rather than linguistic) limitations. This research was funded by the AHRC, under the speculative scheme (£72,288). The Research Assistant on this project was Dr. Cécile Brich.

Post-doctoral fellowship

In 2002-2003, I was awarded an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship for a project entitled Studies in the Information Structure of (child) French.

Acquisition of Wh-questions by francophone children

In 1997-1999, I worked as an RA on Bernadette Plunkett's ESRC-funded project on the acquisition of Wh-questions by francophone children, which led to the creation of the York corpus (now available via CHILDES).