DIRECTORY: — Debra Titone — Annie Gilbert — Shari Baum — Suzie Beaulieu — Julie Bouchard — Krista Byers-Heinlein — Xiaoqian Chai — Marina Doucerain — Denise Klein — Leah Gosselin — Jason Gullifer — Gigi Luk — Natalie Phillips — Linda Polka — Erin Quirk —
Debra Titone, Ph.D (co-director)
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. Prof. 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. Prof. 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
Annie Gilbert, Ph.D (co-director)
Contact Information
Email address: annie.c.gilbert [at] uqtr.ca
Annie C. Gilbert is a Professor of cognitive linguistics at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR). 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 and speech sciences at McGill University, looking at bilingual speech processing.
Links:
Shari Baum, Ph.D
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. Prof. 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.
Links:
Departmental Website
Neurolinguistics Laboratory
PubMed
Suzie Beaulieu, Ph.D
Contact Information
Email address: suzie.beaulieu [at] lli.ulaval.ca
Suzie Beaulieu is a Professor at Université Laval (Département de langues, linguistique et traduction). Her research, situated at the intersection of sociolinguistics and language acquisition, approaches bilingualism through its social conditions: what speakers do with their languages, the linguistic capital they are granted, and what instruction can change about their linguistic resources. It brings to bilingualism research a speaker profile that remain thinly documented, namely adult migrants whose bilingualism developed without the support of formal schooling, before their arrival in Quebec.
Links:
Departmental Website
ResearchGate
Julie Bouchard, Ph.D
Contact Information
Email address: julie2_bouchard [at] uqac.ca
Julie Bouchard is an Associate Professor in the Département des arts, des lettres et du langage at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, where she works primarily in the field of English language teaching. Her research focuses on the development of second-language interactional competence, bilingual practices, and language alternation in educational contexts. Using conversation analysis, she examines how learners and teachers draw on their linguistic resources to accomplish activities, manage interaction, and collaboratively construct meaning. Her work focuses particularly on English language learning contexts in Québec and on how French and English are mobilized in classroom interactions. Her research contributes to MoBI’s objectives by advancing our understanding of bilingualism as a situated and interactional practice.
Links:
Krista Byers-Heinlein, Ph.D
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. Prof. Byers-Heinlein, in collaboration with Prof. 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
Xiaoqian Chai, Ph.D
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. Prof. 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
Marina Doucerain, Ph.D
Contact
Email address: doucerain.marina [at] uqam.ca
Marina Doucerain is a Professor of social psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and director of Laboratoire Culture, Identité et Langue (CIEL). Her research focuses primarily on intercultural psychology and the social dynamics associated with immigration. Specializing in issues of acculturation, cultural diversity, and intergroup relations, she is interested in how individuals adapt when they encounter new cultural or social contexts. Prof. Doucerain’s work contributes to a better understanding of the challenges and benefits of everyday intercultural interactions by highlighting the psychological mechanisms that shape coexistence in highly diverse contexts.
Links:
Departmental Website
Laboratoire Culture, Identité et Langue (CIEL)
Google Scholar
Leah Gosselin, Ph.D (coordinator)
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:
Jason Gullifer, Ph.D
Contact Information
Email address: j.gullifer [at] marianopolis.edu
Jason Gullifer is a Professor of Computer Science at Marianopolis College. He uses computational, behavioural, and neuroscientific methods to study cognition and language. His work focuses on how linguistic diversity and the social dynamics of the language environment shape the way language is represented and processed. He also explores how these factors shape cognition more broadly. Together with collaborators, he developed language entropy as a way to quantify the social diversity of bilingual language use, offering a continuous alternative to the treatment of bilingualism as a categorical phenomenon. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology and Language Science from The Pennsylvania State University and completed his postdoctoral work at McGill University, in the Department of Psychology and at the Montréal Neurological Institute.
Links:
Denise Klein, Ph.D
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). Prof. 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
Gigi Luk, Ph.D
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). Prof. 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
Natalie Phillips, Ph.D
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). Prof. 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
Linda Polka, Ph.D
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. Prof. Polka’s laboratory, in collaboration with Prof. 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
Erin Quirk, Ph.D
Contact Information
Email address: linda.polka [at] mcgill.ca
Erin Quirk is Assistant Professor at the Université de Sherbooke in the Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines and director of the Centre de Langues at l’UdeS. Her research program looks at the societal, familial, and linguistic factors that support multilingual development, in particular, among heritage language speaking and trilingual pre-school to school-aged children. Her lab, LAPLUS, is currently launching a study comparing trilingual development in two sociolinguistic contexts – Montreal and Sherbrooke – using questionnaires combined with census data, in person testing of children’s linguistic and cognitive abilities, and long-form recordings of children’s language use and exposure in naturalistic settings. The overarching goal of her research is to contribute to our understanding of how to best support multilingual children and their families.
Links:
Departmental Website
Laboratoire pour l'étude du plurilinguisme à Sherbrooke (LaPluS)
Google Scholar
ORCID
