Cécile De Cat
Cécile De Cat is the PI on the project. She’s a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leeds, where she is director of Language@Leeds. She is also the leader of the Speech & Language action group at the Centre for Applied Education Research in Bradford, and Professor II at the University of Tromso, Norway.
Her research interests include the interplay between language and cognition in monolingual and bilingual children, the developmental and environmental predictors of bilingual children’s proficiency in the school language, and language processing in adult bilinguals. She has a keen interest in data modelling and visualisation.
Arief Gusnanto
Arief Gusnanto is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the University of Leeds. His research spans many different applications of statistics, from molecular biology, medicine and health, genetics and epidemiology, chemistry, psychology, social sciences, to linguistics.
His interest is in the development of statistical methods in machine learning, bioinformatics, biostatistics, high-dimensional data, mixed models, multivariate analysis, and survival analysis. In this project, he is keen to develop advanced statistical methods to uncover underlying pattern and association for bilingual language experience.
Draško Kašćelan
Draško Kašćelan is a linguist and a lecturer in the Division of Speech and Language Therapy at the University of Essex. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the Q-BEx project, and was based at the University of Leeds.
His previous research focused on child bilingualism, cognition, figurative language (idioms and metaphors), autistic-like traits, and autism. His other areas of interest include code-switching, pragmatic language development, language processing, and language impairment.
Philippe Prévost
Philippe Prévost is Professor of linguistics at the University of Tours, France. His research focuses on comparing morphosyntactic development of French in different contexts of acquisition, including child L2 acquisition and acquisition in contexts of pathology, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI).
He’s particularly interested in exploring the impact of computational complexity in language development. In 2009-2013, he was involved in COST Action IS0804 “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment” during which he participated in the development of language tools for the identification of SLI in bilingual children, including a clitic production task and a sentence repetition task, as well as a questionnaire for parents of bilingual children (PABIQ).
Ludovica Serratrice
Ludovica Serratrice has qualifications in conference interpreting, English and French language and literature, and linguistics. After obtaining a PhD in linguistics at the University of Edinburgh with a dissertation on the bilingual acquisition of Italian and English in pre-school children, she moved to the University of Manchester where she worked for 16 years conducting research on monolingual and bilingual acquisition and lecturing on the BSc Speech and Language Therapy degree.
In 2016 Ludovica moved to the University of Reading where she holds a professorship in bi-multilingualism and teaches on the MSci Speech and Language Therapy degree. Since May 2018 Ludovica has been the director of the Centre of Literacy and Multilingualism and in 2019 she was appointed Professor II at the University of Tromso, Norway. Her research interests include language acquisition and processing in pre-school and school-age children, and she is passionate about co-producing research with teachers and speech and language therapists working with EAL learners.
Laurie Tuller
After an early career working in the area of theoretical syntax based on fieldwork on Afroasiatic languages, Laurie Tuller began devoting her research time to projects in the field of psycholinguistics, investigating language acquisition in children and adolescents with hearing loss, with epilepsy, and with developmental language disorder.
She currently works on language in autism, and also investigates language acquisition in children growing up in bilingual contexts, some of whom additionally have a condition such as autism or developmental language disorder. She participated actively in COST Action IS0804, notably in the developmental of a parental questionnaire for parents of bilingual children, and other LITMUS tools (SR and NWR).
Sharon Unsworth
Sharon Unsworth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Communication and the Department of Modern Languages at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
She is passionate about figuring out which factors contribute to making bilingual language development a success and passing this knowledge on to parents, teachers and policy makers. Her research, often funded by national research councils, has been published in international scientific journals and she makes regular contributions to both national and international conferences. Sharon regularly gives talks and writes blogs for parents and teachers, and she makes a podcast, Kletsheads all about bilingual children (“kletsen” is the Dutch word for “to chat”). The podcast is a spin-off of the child language festival Kletskoppen (“chatterboxes”) she started with colleagues in 2017. You can find out more about Sharon and her research on her webpage.
