Biography

She has also served as the Director of the Dyslexia Unit, Bangor University, Sept 04 - Jan 07.

Prof. Gathercole came to Bangor in 1995 to take up a post in the School of Psychology, Bangor University. Previously, she was a Professor and Head of the Linguistics Program, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA, 86-90, 93-95.

Prof. Gathercole holds a PhD and MA in Linguistics from the U. of Kansas and an Honors BA in Spanish from St. Louis U.

Research interests

Professor Gathercole's research focuses on a number of related areas:
(A) processes underlying language acquisition, and the roles of syntactic complexity, semantic complexity, cognitive complexity, frequency of input, and social variables;
(B) cross-linguistic research and what it can reveal;
(C) the acquisition of word meaning;
(D) the acquisition of Spanish, English, and Welsh;
(E) the acquisition of language by bilinguals and second-language learners;
and
(F) applications of theoretical work on language development for education, language intervention, and educational psychologists.

Selected Publications

Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  (editor).  in press.  Routes to Language: Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman.  Taylor & Francis Publishers. 
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Thomas, Enlli Môn.  in press.  Bilingual first language development:  Dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Thomas, Enlli Môn, & Hughes, Emma.  in press.  Designing a normed receptive vocabulary test for bilingual populations: A model from Welsh.  International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, & Thomas, Enlli Môn.  in press.  Bilingual children: Language and assessment issues for educators.  To appear in Clare Wood, Karen Littleton, &  Judith Kleine Staarman (eds.), Handbook of Educational Psychology, Elsevier.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.   in press.  "It was so much fun.  It was 20 fun!"  Cognitive and linguistic invitations to the development of scalar predicates.  In V. C. M.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  (ed.).  2007.  Language Transmission in Bilingual Families in Wales.  Cardiff: Welsh Language Board.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  2007.  Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: Constructivist account of morpho-syntactic development in bilingual children.  International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10 (3), 224-247.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, & Hoff, Erika. 2007.  Input and the acquisition of language: Three questions.  In E. Hoff & M. Shatz (eds.), The Handbook of Language Development, Blackwell Publishers.  107-127.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  (ed.)  2006.  Two-volume Special Issue:  Language-specific influences on acquisition and cognition.  First Language 26 (1) and (2).
Roberts, Seren Haf, & Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.   2006.  Categorising collections of objects: Linguistic and cognitive factors influencing Welsh and English speakers' judgments.  First Language 26 (2), 161-185.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  2005.  Input, cognición, y estructura lingüística: Influencias conjuntas en el desarrollo del lenguaje en los niños.  (Input, cognition, and linguistic structure: Concerted influences on language development in children.)  In María Angeles Mayor Cinca, Begoña Zubiauz, Emiliano Díez-Villoria (eds.), Estudios sobre la adquisición del lenguaje (Studies of Language Acquisition).  Dialnet, Universidad de la Rioja.  27-57.
Gathercole, V., Laporte, N., & Thomas, E.  2005.  Differentiation, carry-over, and the distributed characteristic in bilinguals: Structural "mixing" of the two languages?  Proceedings of ISB4.  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Gathercole, V., & Thomas, E. 2005. Minority language survival: Input factors influencing the acquisition of Welsh. Proceedings of ISB4.  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Sebastián, Eugenia, & Soto,  Pilar.  2002.  The emergence of linguistic Person in Spanish-speaking children.  Language Learning 52:4, 679-722.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Sebastián, Eugenia, & Soto,  Pilar.  2002.  Negative commands in Spanish-speaking children: No need for recourse to relativized minimality.  J of Child Language, 29, 393-401.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  2002.  Command of the mass/count distinction in bilingual and monolingual children: An English morphosyntactic distinction.  In D. Kimbrough Oller & Rebecca E. Eilers (eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children.  Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.  175-206
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  2002.  Grammatical gender in bilingual and monolingual children: A Spanish morphosyntactic distinction.  In D. Kimbrough Oller & Rebecca E. Eilers (eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children.  Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.  207-219.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  2002.  Monolingual and bilingual acquisition: Learning different treatments of that-trace phenomena in English and Spanish.  In D. Kimbrough Oller & Rebecca E. Eilers (eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children.  Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.  220-254.
Sebastián, Eugenia, Soto, Pilar, & Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  2001.  Early verb constructs in Spanish.  In Margareta Almgren, Andoni Barreña,  María-José Ezeizabarrena, Itziar Idiazabal, & Brian MacWhinney (eds.), Research on Child Language Acquisition: Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Child Language: Volume 2: Syntax, morphology, phonology, and the lexicon.  Cascadilla Press.  1245-1259.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  2001.  The Whorf Hypothesis.  In Jonathan Michie (ed.), Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences, Vol 2.  Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.  1757-1759.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, & Whitfield, Lisa J. Cramer.  2001.  Function as a criterion for the extension of new words.  Journal of Child Language 28, 87-125.
Gathercole, V., Thomas, E., & Laporte, N. 2001. Acquisition of Welsh grammatical gender. J Celtic Lang Learning, 6, 53-87.
Gathercole, V., Thomas, E., & Evans, D.  2000.  What's in a noun?  Welsh-, English-, and Spanish-speaking children see it differently. First Language 20, 55-90.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Sebastián, Eugenia, & Soto, Pilar.  2000.  Lexically specified patterns in early verbal morphology in Spanish.  In M. R. Perkins & S. J. Howard (Eds.) New directions in language development and disorders. New York & London: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.  149-168.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Thomas, Enlli Môn, & Kim, Soohee.  1999.  Cue coordination: An alternative to word meaning biases.  In Barbara Fox, Dan Jurafsky, & Laura Michaelis (eds.), Cognition and function in language. Stanford: CSLI Publications.  120-135.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Sebastián, Eugenia, & Soto, Pilar.  1999.  The early acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology: Across-the-board or piecemeal knowledge?  International Journal of Bilingualism 3: 2&3, 133-182.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  1998.  Lexical constraints in acquisition: Are they viable any longer?  Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 34-2: Constraints, acquisition of spoken language, acquisition of the lexicon. 
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller.  1997.  The linguistic mass/count distinction as an indicator of referent categorization in monolingual and bilingual children.  Child Development 68, 832-842.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, & Min, Haesik. 1997.  Word meaning biases or language-specific effects?  Evidence from English, Spanish, and Korean.  First Language 17, 31-56.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, & Montes, Cecilia.  1997.  That-trace effects in Spanish- and English-speaking monolinguals and bilinguals.  In A. T. Pérez-Leroux & W. R. Glass (eds.), Contemporary perspectives on the acquisition of Spanish, Vol. 1: Developing grammars.  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.  75-95.
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, Cramer, Lisa, Somerville, Susan C., & Jansen op de Haar, Marian.  1995.  Ontological categories and function: Acquisition of new names.  Cognitive Development 10, 225-251.

Other information

Current and recent projects include:

Head. ESRC funded project on: Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism Across the Lifespan. 2006-2010. V. Gathercole (PI) & E. M. Thomas. £711,774.
Head. Welsh Assembly Government grant: Standardised measures for the assessment of Welsh. 2006-2009. Virginia C. Gathercole (PI) & Enlli Thomas. £90,000.
Head. Welsh Language Board project on: Why are the children of some bilingual parents not brought up bilingually, and what can be done to change this? 2003-2004. Virginia C. Gathercole (PI), Enlli Thomas, Eddie Williams, & Margaret Deuchar. £93,000.
Co-recipient: ESRC grant: A mobile laboratory for the study of normal and delayed development of language (reading and spelling, syntax, semantics, and phonology). 2002. Nick C. Ellis (PI), Virginia C. Gathercole, & Marilyn M. Vihman. £48,809
Co-recipient: The Wellcome Trust grant: Mechanisms of lexical access in language production. 2002-2005. Charles Leek (PI), Marie-Josèphe Tainturier, & Virginia C. Gathercole. £106,066.
Recipient. ESRC grant: The acquisition of Welsh mutation, gender, and grammatical categories. 1999-2002. Virginia C. Gathercole. £165,176.00
Recipient. Acciones Integradas grant: co-sponsored by the British Council and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Co-directed with Ma. Eugenia Sebastián Gascón, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. 1996-97.
Recipient. Visiting Research grant, Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmeg¬en, The Netherlands. August 1989.
Recipient. Spain Research Fellowship, Council for the International Exchange of Scholars/Fulbright Commission. 1987 88. (January 1988 August 1988) (July & August 1988)

TEST DEVELOPMENT

Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller, & Thomas, Enlli Môn. 2007. Prawf Geirfa Cymraeg, Fersiwn 7-11. (Welsh Vocabulary Test, Version 7-11). 2007. Standardized test of vocabulary for Welsh-speaking children, ages 7-11. Standardized especially for bilingual children of distinct home-language backgrounds.

We are working on further standardized tests of Welsh vocabulary development for (normally developing) Welsh-speaking bilingual children, for younger (2-6) and older (11-15) children. Our plans are to follow these with the development of a standardized tests of Welsh grammatical structures and of productive vocabulary.

Click here for additional personal page.