Members

Kristine Onishi

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
McGill University
Stewart Biological Sciences Bldg., 1205 Dr Penfield Avenue #N8/16
tel: 514-398-1725
e-mail: kris.onishi(at)mcgill.ca

Membership Status

Principal Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition

Areas of Expertise

Language development and processing, cognitive psychology

Current Research Interests

I am interested in how we become competent language users--how we learn the relevant sound and conceptual structures for language and how we map between the two. My research has examined:

  • how infants (and adults) learn about the sound structures of their native language. For example, how do speakers of English learn that "fing" is a more likely word than "ngif"?; and
  • what types of conceptual structures infants possess that enable language learning. For example, do infants understand that other people act on the basis of goals and beliefs.

Selected Publications

  • Onishi, K.H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science, 308, 255-258.
  • Chambers, K.E., Onishi, K.H., & Fisher, C. (2003). Infants learn phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience. Cognition, 87, B69-B77.
  • Onishi, K.H., Chambers, K.E., & Fisher, C. (2002). Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience. Cognition,83, B13-B23.
  • Onishi, K.H., & Murphy, G.L. (2002). Discourse model representation of referential and attributive descriptions. Language and Cognitive Processes, 17, 97-123.

Relevant Links

Yuriko Oshima-Takane

Professor
Department of Psychology
McGill University
Stewart Biological Sciences Bldg., 1205 Dr Penfield Avenue #N8/14
tel: 514-398-4672
e-mail: yuriko(at)psych.mcgill.ca

Membership Status

Principal Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition

Areas of Expertise

Current Research Interests

My research interests lie mainly in the development of language and communication. My current research interest is to understand the underlying mechanisms as well as environmental factors that together determine the course of early language development. My research in this area includes the learning of nouns and verbs in normal children, children with developmental disorders, and hearing impaired children, birth order effects on early language development, and the role of parental language styles in language development. I recently began a cross-linguistic study of English and Japanese to investigate universal and language-specific patterns in the acquisition of nouns and verbs. In addition to empirical studies, I have conducted computer modeling experiments and network analysis to understand semantic representations and the developmental mechanisms in children.

Selected Publications

  • Oshima-Takane, Y. (in press). Acquisition of nouns and verbs in Japanese. In M. Nakayama, R. Mazuka, Y.Shirai & Ping Li (Eds.), Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics:Japanese. Cambridg: Cambridge University Press.
  • Ito, K., & Oshima-Takane, Y. (2004). Determinants of developmental order of Japanese ko/so/a deictic words. Journal of Communication Disorders, 21, 11-14.
  • Oshima-Takane, Y. (2004). The development of verb argument structure in Japanese monolingual, English monolingual,and Japanese-English bilingual children. Report of the Japanese Government Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)(2) (2001-2003). Project N. 13610154. 135 pages. Tokyo: Tokyo University.

Relevant Links

Linda Polka

Associate Professor
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
McGill University
Beatty Hall, 1266 Pine Avenue West
tel: 514-398-7235
e-mail: linda.polka(at)mcgill.ca

Membership Status

Principal Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition
Speech Science Modeling

Areas of Expertise

Speech acoustics, acoustic phonetics, speech perception, development of speech perception and production focusing on infancy, cross-language and L2 speech perception, hearing assessment, tympanometry

Current Research Interests

My research examines the development of speech perception from infancy through adulthood with a focus on developmental changes occuring in the first year of life. In current projects I am exploring the effects of age and language experience on several aspects of perceptual development including vowel and consonant perception, language preference and discrimination, and word segmentation skills. This research includes comparisons of monolingual and bilingual development and studies exploring the impact of otitis media on infant speech perception development.

Selected Publications

  • Polka, L., Rvachew, S. & Mattock, K. (In press). Experiential influences on speech perception and production during infancy. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz, (Eds.), Handbook of Child Language. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
  • Rvachew, S., Mattock, K., Polka, L. & Menard, L. (2006). Developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the infant vowel space:The case of Canadian English and Canadian French. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120, 2250-2259.
  • Sundara, M. Polka, L. & Genesee, F. (2006). Language experience facilitates discrimination of /d – ð/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English, Cognition, 100, 369-388.
  • Sundara, M., Polka, L. & Baum, S. (2006). Production of coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual adults. Bilingualism, Language, and Cognition, 9, 97-114
  • Polka, L. & Rvachew, S. (2005). The impact of otitis media with effusion on infant phonetic perception. Infancy, 8, 1010-117.
  • Polka, L. & Bohn, O-S. (2003). Asymmetries in vowel perception. Speech Communication, 41, 221-231.

Graduate Students

  • Karen Mattock (PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, co-supervised)
  • Andrea McLeod (PhD, Postdoctoral fellow)
  • Monika Molnar (PhD candidate, co-supervised)

    • Relevant Links

Philippe Prévost

Associate Professor
Département de langues, linguistique et traduction
Université Laval

Membership Status

Associate Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition

Areas of Expertise

Current Research Interests

Selected Publications

Graduate Students

Phaedra Royle

Professeure adjointe
École d'orthophonie et d'audiologie
Université de Montréal
Pavillon Marguerite d'Youville, 2375,
e-mail: phaedra.royle(at)umontreal.ca

Membership Status

Associate Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition

Areas of Expertise

Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Dysphasia, Language Acquisition, Neurolinguistics

Current Research Interests

  • Outils morphosyntaxiques pour le dépistage de la dysphasie chez les jeunes francophones
  • Projet pilote sur les effets sémantiques, morphologiques et phonologiques dans l'accès lexical au verbe en français: une étude de potentiels évoqués
  • Projet pilote sur le développement du syntagme nominal chez les enfants hispanophones d'âge préscolaire

Selected Publications

  • Royle, P., Jarema, G. & Kehayia, E. (2003). Verb reading in developmental language impairment. Brain and Language, 87, 311-322.
  • Royle,P., Jarema, G. & Kehayia, E. (2002). Auditory verb recognition in developmental language impairment. Brain and Language, 81, 487-500.
  • Rose, Y., Royle, P., Jarema, G. & Kehayia, E. (2002). Frequency effects on visual word access in developmental language impairment. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 15, 11-41.

Relevant Links

Susan Rvachew

Associate Professor
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
McGill University
Beatty Hall, 1266 Pine Avenue West
tel: 514-398-4136
e-mail: susan.rvachew(at)mcgill.ca

Membership Status

Principal Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition
Speech Science Modeling

Areas of Expertise

Current Research Interests

My research is concerned with the interaction of phonemic perception abilities and articulation skills in phonological development. My studies involve either infants or preschool-aged children. The research methods that I use include longitudinal descriptive and comparative designs as well as experimental treatment efficacy studies. Currently, I am investigating cross-linguistic differences in phonetic development during infancy and the development of prereading and early reading skills in young children with severely delayed phonological skills. I am also developing several computer-based tools for improving children’s phonological processing abilities

Selected Publications

  • Rvachew, S. & Grawburg, M. (2006). Correlates of phonological awareness in preschoolers with speech sound disorders. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 74-87.
  • Rvachew, S., Mattock, K., Polka, L., & Ménard, L. (2006). Developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the infant vowel space. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120(4), 2250-2259.
  • • Rvachew, S., Nowak, M., & Cloutier, G. (2004). Effect of phonemic perception training on the speech production and phonological awareness skills of children with expressive phonological delay. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 13, 250-263.
  • Rvachew, S. & Nowak, M. (2001). The effect of target selection strategy on sound production learning. Journal of Speech-Language and Hearing Research, 44, 610-623.
  • Rvachew, S., Slawinski, E.B., Williams, M., & Green, C. (1999). The impact of early onset otitis media on babbling and early language development. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 105, 467-475.

Graduate Students

  • Dr. Karen Mattock (PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, co-supervised)
  • Dr. Andrea Macleod (PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, co-supervised)
  • Ms. Jennifer Mortimer (PhD candidate)
  • Ms. Pi-Yu Chiang (Ph.D. candidate)
  • Mr. Abdulsalam Al-Haidary (PhD candidate)
  • Ms. Francoise Brosseau-Lapré (PhD candidate)

Relevant Links

Robert Savage

Associate Professor
Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology
McGill University
3700 McTavish Street, #420
tel: 514-398-3435
e-mail: robert.savage(at)mcgill.ca

Membership Status

Associate member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition
Visual Language Processing

Areas of Expertise

The development of cognitive processes in normal reading and spelling in the early years; the cognitive psychology of poor reading and developmental dyslexia; early identification and intervention.

Current Research Interests

Dr. Savage has a range of interests in children's reading and spelling acquisition, including research on basic cognitive processes in normal early reading development such as analogy and inference-use, the cognitive processing problems in poor readers and dyslexics, such as phonological awareness, and rapid naming and the early identification and effective intervention for reading and spelling problems in schools.

Selected Publications

  • Savage, R. S. (2004). Motor skills, automaticity and developmental dyslexia: A review of the research literature. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 17, 3, 301-324.
  • Savage, R., Carless, S., & Stuart, M. (2003). The effects of rime- and phoneme-based teaching delivered by learning support assistants. Journal of Research in Reading, 26(3), 211-233).
  • Savage, R. S. (2001). A re-evaluation of the evidence for orthographic analogies: A reply to Goswami (1999). Journal of Research in Reading, 24(1), 1-19.
  • Savage R.S. & Stuart, M. (2001). Orthographic analogies and early reading: Explorations of performance and variation in two transfer tasks. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 3, 1-27.

Relevant Links

Rushen Shi

Professeur
Département de Psychologie
UQAM
Pavillon J.A. De Sève, local DS-2935, 305 rue Christin
tel: 514-987-3000, poste 7604
e-mail: shi.rushen(at)uqam.ca

Membership Status

Principal Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition
Speech Science Modeling

Areas of Expertise

Current Research Interests

Selected Publications

Graduate Students

Relevant Links

Lab website

Thomas Shultz

Professor
Department of Psychology
McGill University
Stewart Biological Sciences Bldg., 1205 Dr Penfield Avenue #W7/3D
tel: 514-398-6139
e-mail: thomas.shultz(at)mcgill.ca

Membership Status

Associate Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition

Areas of Expertise

cognitive science, cognitive development, cognitive consistency, and connectionist modeling

Current Research Interests

My students, colleagues, and I study human cognition through a combination of psychological and computational approaches. Basic psychological phenomena are simulated in a connectionist framework, leading to predictions that are tested with humans. Current lines of research concern cognitive development, interactions between knowledge and learning, techniques for analyzing knowledge representations in neural networks, and cognitive consistency phenomena in social psychology.

Selected Publications

  • Sirois, S., & Shultz, T. R. (2006). Preschoolers out of adults: Discriminative learning with a cognitive load. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 1357-1377.
  • Shultz, T. R. (2006). onstructive learning in the modeling of psychological development. In Y. Munakata & M. H. Johnson (Eds.), Processes of change in brain and cognitive development: Attention and performance XXI (pp. 61-86). Oxford, U.K: Oxford University Press.
  • Shultz, T. R. (2003). Computational developmental psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Relevant Links

Daphnée Simard

Professeure
Département de linguistique et de didactique des langues
UQAM
tel: 987-3000 poste 1262
e-mail: simard.daphnee(at)uqam.ca

Membership Status

Associate Member

Research Themes

Language Acquisition

Areas of Expertise

Rôle des processus attentionnels dans l'acquisition des langues secondes, Capacité de réflexion métalinguistique et développement des langues secondes

Current Research Interests

Je m'intéresse principalement au rôle que joue la réflexion métalinguistique dans l'acquisition du français et de l'anglais langue seconde, plus particulièrement, la réflexion métasyntaxique et métamorphosyntaxique. Je m'intéresse également aux procédés utilisés par les enseignement de langues secondes afin d'attirer l'attention des apprenants sur la forme de la langue cible ainsi qu'à l'effet de ces procédés sur l'acquisition.

Selected Publications

  • Simard, D. (2007). L'éveil au langage en classe de langue seconde : de la sensibilisation langagière. à l'enseignement de la forme. Journal of French Language Studies, 17, 2, 187-206.
  • Simard, D., French, L. & Fortier, V. (à paraître). Elicited metalinguistic reflection and second language learning: Is there a link? System.
  • Fortier, V. & Simard, D. (à paraître). Réflexions métasyntaxiques formulées par des élèves de 6e année apprenant l'anglais langue seconde. Language awareness.
  • Simard, D., & Fortier, V. (sous presse). Metasyntactic ability development among submersion and French native elementary school children: Investigation of task demand. À paraître dans Z. Han (Ed.), Understanding second language process. Multilingual Matters.
  • Simard, D. (2004). Et si la capacité de réflexion métalinguistique avait un sexe: relation entre les réflexions métalinguistiques produites dans une classe dite communicative et le sexe des apprenants de L2. Language Awareness, 13, 265-278.

Graduate Students

  • Véronique Fortier (candidate au Doctorat)
  • Alicia Colson (candidate à la maîtrise)
  • Rimma Osadceaia (candidate à la maîtrise)
  • Michael Zuniga (candidat à la maîtrise)

Relevant Links

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