Cecile McKee

Cecile McKee is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on language acquisition, syntax, and psycholinguistics, with a particular emphasis on child language development and the interplay between language production and grammatical systems. She has conducted extensive studies on syntactic ambiguity resolution, sentence planning, and the role of frequency in morphosyntactic development. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics with applied domains such as public outreach and science communication.

McKee has explored the cognitive and linguistic processes underlying language production in children and adults, investigating how articulation rate, syntactic complexity, and fluency markers reflect sentence planning strategies. Her research also addresses cross-linguistic phenomena, including bilingual literacy and the influence of manual communication systems on deaf children's language development. She has authored foundational texts such as Language Acquisition: A Linguistic Introduction (1994) and pioneered methods for assessing children's syntactic competence through on-line experimental techniques.

Her recent work highlights interdisciplinary applications of linguistics, including public engagement initiatives to demystify language science for broader audiences. McKee has supervised numerous doctoral projects on topics such as syntactic ambiguity awareness and the role of production systems in grammar shaping. Her contributions span over four decades, with active research interests continuing into 2023.