Lab members
-
Shari Baum - James McGill Professor
- Tania Tremblay - Postdoctoral Fellow
- Shani Abada - Doctoral Student
- Isabelle Deschamps - Doctoral Student
- Inbal Itzhak - Doctoral Student
- Monika Molnar - Doctoral Student
- Erin Colreavy Bell - Research Assistant/Lab Manager
- Mélanie Thibeault - Research Assistant
Tania Tremblay
Publications and Presentations
Tremblay, T., & Joanette, Y. (submitted). Language Dynamic in Left- and
Right-Handers: A Study of Phonological and Semantic Word Complexity.
Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition.
Tremblay, T., Monetta, L., & Joanette, Y. (accepted). Complexity and
hemispheric abilities : Evidences for a semantic and phonological
differential impact. Brain and Language.
Tremblay, T., Ansado, J., Walter, N. & Joanette, Y. (2007). Phonological
and semantic processing of words: Laterality changes according to gender in
right- and left-handers. Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and
Cognition, 12, 1-15.
Tremblay, T. & Joanette, Y. (2004). Latéralisation des habiletés
langagières et de la communication verbale chez les non-droitiers.
Rééducation orthophonique (numéro thématique sur Hémisphère droit et
communication verbale), 219, 67-77.
Shani Abada
My research focuses on the role, and neural bases, of prosody in acquiring and understanding language at both the lexical and syntactic levels at various stages of life. Dissertation research uses event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to evaluate the neural correlates of the interaction between prosody and semantics in both the visual and auditory modalities in younger (18 – 25 year-old) and older (65 – 80 year-old) adults. Specifically, this research explores the relative weight given to each type of linguistic information and each modality when interpreting phrasal boundaries in simple utterances.
Publications and Presentations
Curtin, S., Polka, L., Abada, S.H., & Reaper, S. (submitted).
Native-language prosody influences segmentation: Evidence from infant
learners of Canadian English and Canadian French. Infancy. 21 pp.
Abada, S.H., Baum, S.R., & Titone, D. (2008). The effects of central- vs.
peripheral-feature contexts on phonetic ambiguity resolution in younger and
older listeners. Experimental Aging Research, 34 (3), 232-250.
Abada, S.H. & Baum, S.R. (2006). Sensitivity to metrical stress patterns
in word recognition in individuals with left and right hemisphere brain
damage. Brain and Language, 99 (1), 51-52.
Phillips, C. Kazanina, N., & Abada S. (2005). ERP Effects of the
Processing of Syntactic Long-distance Dependencies. September 2004. Cognitive
Brain Research, 22 (3): 407-428.
Abada, S.H., Baum, S.R., Drury, J.E., & Steinhauer, K. (2009, March).
Electrophysiological Investigation of Interactions of Prosody and Semantics
in Cross-Modal Phrasal Interpretations. Poster to be presented at the 16th
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA,
USA.
Pauker, E., Abada, S.H., Itzhak, I., Baum, S.R., & Steinhauer, K. (2009,
March). Older adults’ processing of prosody in spoken English garden-path
sentences: A dissociation between online ERP data and offline behavioral
data. Poster to be presented at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Abada, S.H., Pauker, E., Itzhak, I., Baum, S.R., & Steinhauer, K. (2008,
April). Older adults' responses to co-operating & conflicting prosody in
garden path sentences: an ERP study. Poster presented at the 2008
Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody Conference, Ithaca, NY,
USA.
Curtin, S., Polka, L., Abada, S.H., & Reaper, S.J. (2008, April).
Native-language prosody facilitates segmentation: Evidence from infant
learners of Canadian English and Canadian French. Poster presented at the
16th International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver, March 2008.
Abada, S.H. & Baum, S.R. (2006, October). Sensitivity to metrical stress
patterns in word recognition in individuals with left and right hemisphere
brain damage. Poster presented at the 2006 Academy of Aphasia Annual Meeting,
Victoria, BC, Canada.
Phillips, C., Kazanina, N., Abada, S., & Garcia-Pedrosa, D. (2003,
March). ERP measures of construction and completion of long-distance
dependencies. Poster presented at the 16th annual CUNY Sentence Processing
Conference. Cambridge, MA.
Unpublished Manuscripts
Abada, S.H. (2006). Perception of Specific Prosodic Cues for Speech
Processing Across the Lifespan. Comprehensive paper, School of Communication
Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, 85pp.
Abada, S. H. (2001). Level ordering and recursion in compounds. Unpublished
Honors Thesis, Linguistics Department, University of Maryland, College Park.
15pp.
Isabelle Deschamps C.V. [.pdf]
The research that I am currently undertaking focuses on the processes underlying speech perception, speech production and their interactions in healthy brains and neurological disorders. I am planning on using modern neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the role of speech perception, speech production and their interaction in developmental stuttering and normal language development.
Inbak Itzhak C.V. [.pdf]
My main interest is the processing of ambiguities at the sentence level. In particular, I'm interested in how different factors such as verb information and prosodic information interact during the processing of structural and referential ambiguities. My dissertation focuses on the influence of contrastive stress, and implicit causality in the resolution of pronoun reference ambiguity.
Monika Molnar
Research interest focuses on the development of speech perception from infancy to adulthood with a particular interest in bilingualism.
Erin Colreavy Bell
I completed my PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Western Australia. My thesis investigated the principles behind unsupervised categorization, whereby people learn to categorize novel stimuli without any external feedback or guidance.
New to Montreal, I began working in the Baum Lab in July. My role as lab co-ordinator involves keeping the lab organized and running smoothly. As a research assistant I am developing skills and knowledge in the field of neurolinguistics, which is a side-step from my original PhD topic, and an area I am finding to be very interesting. I am currently involved in the testing of stroke patients in order to investigate various aspects of language production and comprehension, and will soon be using fMRI techniques with a normal population with the aim of furthering this research.
Mélanie Thibeault
Web page at UQAM
My research interests are in articulatory phonetics using both ultrasound imaging and electromagnetic articulography. More precisely, I’m interested in the impact of speech prosody on supraglottal articulators.
Publications and Presentations
Ménard, L. & Thibeault, M. (to appear). Développement moteur et émergence de la structure prosodique chez l'enfant: une étude de l'accent d'emphase en français, Revue Canadienne de Linguistique.
Ménard, L., Perrier, P., Savariaux, C., Aubin, J. & Thibeault, M. (2008). Articulatory compensation strategies to a lip-tube perturbation of French [u]: an acoustic study of 4-year-old children , Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124, 1192-1206.
Paradis, C. & Thibeault, M. (2004). L'adaptation de la voyelle /y/ en /ju/ dans les emprunts en russe: un cas de palatalisation, non de biphonémicité, Revue Canadienne de Linguistique, 49(2), 175-222.
Ménard, L., Aubin, J., Brisebois, A. & Thibeault, M. (2007). A study of the development of speech motor control using ultrasound recordings, Ultrafest IV, New-York, September.
Thibeault, M., Brisebois, A., Leclerc, A., Aubin, J. & Ménard, L. (2007). Speech production in blind and sighted speakers: an analysis of tongue positions in different prosodic contexts, Ultrafest IV, New-York, September.
Thibeault, M., Ménard, L., Leclerc, A., Calabrino, A. & Brasseur, A. (2006). Acoustic and articulatory correlates of contrastive focus, 151st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Providence, June.
Ménard, L., Aubin, J., Roy, J.-P., Leclerc, A. & Thibeault, M.. (2006). An ultrasound analysis of prosodic effects on tongue positions in French children and adults, 5th International Conference on Speech Motor Control, Nijmegen, Netherlands, June.
Thibeault, M., Leclerc, A., Calabrino, A., Brasseur, A. & Ménard, L. (2006). Emphase contrastive: corrélats acoustiques et positions de la langue, 74e congrès de l’ACFAS, Montréal, May.
Thibeault, M. (2006). Emphase contrastive : corrélats acoustiques et positions de la langue, XXes Journées de linguistique, Université Laval, Québec, Mars.
Thibeault, M. & Ladouceur, J. (2003). Linguistica: la catégorisation grammaticale automatique, 38. Linguistisches Kolloquium, Piliscsaba, Hongary, August.
Thibeault, M. (2003). La catégorisation grammaticale automatique: adaptation au français du catégoriseur de Brill, 71e congrès de l'ACFAS, Rimouski, May.
Thibeault, M. (2002). La catégorisation grammaticale automatique : les algorithmes de Brill, XVIes Journées de linguistique, Université Laval, Québec, Mars.
