The principal members of our team—all established university researchers and members of the Centre for Research on Brain, Language & Music—share the common goal of stimulating creativity and making the maximum use of our joint resources to achieve our objective of broadening and deepening our understanding of multilingualism. All members contribute significantly to multiple research themes, ensuring a truly interdisciplinary focus. As a result, we have the breadth and depth of expertise to identify the most probing and critical issues in multilingualism across the lifespan (from early infancy to aging) and the cutting-edge tools and techniques to address them.
Team Leader:
Team Members:
Dr. Shari Baum — Dr. Sarah Benkirane — Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein — Dr. Xiaoqian Chai — Dr. Annie Gilbert — Dr. Leah Gosselin — Dr. Denise Klein — Dr. Gigi Luk — Dr. Natalie Phillips — Dr. Linda Polka
Dr. Debra Titone
Contact Information
Email address: debra.titone [at] mcgill.ca
Debra Titone, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Language and Multilingualism, is a Professor and Director of the Language and Multilingualism Lab in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. She has extensive experience conducting research with special populations and with using eye movement methods to study bilingualism in younger and older adults. Dr. Titone’s research program investigates whether and how individual differences in executive function, and other cognitive and linguistic capacities, affect bilingual language processing over the lifespan. Dr. Titone is leading the field in investigating how bilingual social networks similarly impact first and second language processing and executive control.
Links:
Departmental Website
Google Scholar
Dr. Shari Baum
Contact Information
Email address: shari.baum [at] mcgill.ca
Shari Baum is a Distinguished James McGill Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (McGill University) and the founding Director of the CRBLM. Dr. Baum has made a major contribution to the literature on neurolinguistics, with research focused on understanding the neural bases and functions of multiple aspects of speech and language processing. She brings to the team expertise in theoretical linguistics, speech production and perception, and language neuroscience. Dr. Baum serves as the ‘Responsable’ for the team, drawing on her extensive experience in managing research teams and drawing together interdisciplinary investigators.
Links:
Departmental Website
Neurolinguistics Laboratory
PubMed
Dr. Sarah Benkirane
Contact Information
Email address: Benkirane.sarah [at] uqam.ca
Sarah Benkirane is the coordinator of The Montreal Bilingualism Initiative. She is currently a senior Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is supervised by Dr. Marina M. Doucerain, a MoBI collaborator. Her research focuses on access to mental health care for first- and second-generation immigrants to Canada. She has a particular interest in understanding the role of second language use on mental health service utilization. For any questions regarding MoBI please feel free to reach out to Sarah directly.
Links:
Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein
Contact Information
Email address: K.Byers [at] concordia.ca
Krista Byers-Heinlein is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Concordia University, holding the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism from 2014–2020. She is also a founding member of the governing board of the ManyBabies consortium and led two of its major projects. Her research program investigates language, cognitive, and social development in bilingual infants and toddlers. Dr. Byers-Heinlein, in collaboration with Dr. Polka, established the Montréal Bilingual Infant corpus based on day-long home recordings of bilingual infants’ lives. She brings expertise in cutting-edge tools and open science practices to promote collaboration and transparency in behavioral research, including experiments on real-time language processing, census-based population analysis, and artificial intelligence approaches.
Links:
Departmental Website
Concordia Infant Research Laboratory
Google Scholar
Dr. Xiaoqian Chai
Contact Information
Email address: xiaoqian.chai [at] mcgill.ca
Xiaoqian Chai, a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, is an Assistant Professor at McGill University and a core member of the McConnell Brain Imaging Center at the Montréal Neurological Institute. She uses multimodal brain imaging methods as well as publicly available datasets to investigate the interplay between cognitive development, brain maturation, plasticity, and second language learning. Dr. Chai’s laboratory is currently expanding its research program to include pediatric populations and is launching a longitudinal, multimodal imaging study designed to profile the developmental trajectory of brain networks in bilingual school-aged children.
Links:
Departmental Website
Chai Laboratory
Google Scholar
Dr. Annie Gilbert
Contact Information
Email address: annie.c.gilbert [at] mcgill.ca
Dr. Annie C. Gilbert is a research associate at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University. Her research investigates the impact of individual differences in bilingual experience on speech production and segmentation in L1 and L2 using behavioural and electrophysiological paradigms. She earned her Ph.D. in phonetics at Université de Montréal and competed her postdoctoral work in psychology at McGill University, looking at bilingual speech planning.
Links:
Dr. Leah Gosselin
Contact Information
Email address: leah.gosselin [at] mail.mcgill.ca
Leah Gosselin is the coordinator of The Montreal Bilingualism Initiative. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher (under the supervision of Prof. Debra Titone) in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. Leah is particularly interested in exploiting naturalistic socioecological paradigms to probe the intersection between bi/multilingualism and cognition. Currently, her work with Prof. Debra Titone engages this research interest by honing-in on digital communication (i.e., typing). For any questions regarding MoBI, please feel free to reach out to Leah directly.
Links:
Dr. Denise Klein
Contact Information
Email address: denise.klein [at] mcgill.ca
Denise Klein, current Director of the CRBLM, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, and a Neuropsychologist at the Montréal Neurological Institute (McGill University). Dr. Klein is an expert on the neural bases of bilingualism and conducted some of the first neuroimaging investigations of bilingual language representation. She has published ground-breaking work over the past two decades, by combining behavioural methods with task-based functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to investigate how neural recruitment may be influenced by age of acquisition, proficiency, and the distinctive characteristics of languages. More recently, she has focused on developing expertise with techniques such as voxel-based morphometry (VBM), cortical thickness measures, diffusion tensor tractography, and resting-state fMRI.
Links:
Departmental Website
Klein Laboratory
Google Scholar
Dr. Gigi Luk
Contact Information
Email address: gigi.luk [at] mcgill.ca
Gigi Luk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology (McGill University). Dr. Luk has established a research program to understand the cognitive and neural processes relevant to bilingualism and to promote a culturally responsive environment in educational settings, cultivating respect and inclusion for linguistic diversity. These goals guide her laboratory’s research projects in three directions: (1) characterizing bilingualism beyond English language proficiency in schools and in communities; (2) examining bilingualism and cognitive skills supporting language and literacy outcomes; and (3) establishing the neural correlates of learning new information in learners with diverse language experiences.
Links:
Departmental Website
Bilingualism, Experience and Education Laboratory
Google Scholar
Dr. Natalie Phillips
Contact Information
Email address: natalie.phillips [at] concordia.ca
Natalie Phillips is a Professor of Psychology at Concordia University, Fellow of the Science College, and the Concordia University Research Chair (Tier 1) in Sensory-Cognitive Health in Aging and Dementia. She is currently the Associate Scientific Director of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging and is one of the principal developers of the Montréal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Dr. Phillips is also a recognized expert in the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine cognitive function as it relates to multilingualism. Her current line of work examines the impact of multilingualism on cognitive reserve and brain anatomy in persons with or at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
Links:
Departmental Website
Cognition, Aging and Psychophysiology Laboratory
Google Scholar
Dr. Linda Polka
Contact Information
Email address: linda.polka [at] mcgill.ca
Linda Polka is a Professor and Graduate Program Director at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (McGill University). She is also a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and former Chair of their Speech Communication division. Dr. Polka’s research program examines speech perception development during infancy and how it is shaped by language experience. She has contributed foundational knowledge on how infants perceive phonetic segments and how they process fluent speech in multilingual environments. Dr. Polka’s laboratory, in collaboration with Dr. Byers-Heinlein, established the Montréal Bilingual Infant corpus, the first audio archive of the language environment of bilingual infants in their everyday lives in Canada.
Links:
Departmental Website
McGill Infant Speech Perception Laboratory
Google Scholar
