Debra Titone | |
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Citizenship | Canada |
Occupation(s) | Professor and Canada Research Chair in Language & Multilingualism, McGill University |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | New York University; Binghamton University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | McGill University |
Debra Titone is a cognitive psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is currently a Professor of Psychology and a chair holder of Canada Research in Language &Multilingualism at McGill University. [1] [2] Titone is a founding member and officer of the professional society,Women in Cognitive Science. [3] She and her colleagues have written about gender disparities in opportunities,along with the advancement of women the field of cognitive science,with specific reference to Canada. [4]
Titone is a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Brain,Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) [5] and,in 2019,she received their Richard C. Tees Distinguished Leadership Award. [6] Previous honors included the SWAP Feminist Mentoring Award from the Canadian Psychological Association,awarded to Titone in 2017. [7]
Titone received her B.A.,with honors in Psychology from New York University. [8] She subsequently obtained her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the Binghamton University in 1995,where she was mentored by Cynthia Connine. [9] With Connine,she conducted research on idiomatic expressions,focusing specifically on how individual word components influence idiom interpretation. [10] [11]
Titone completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University,supervised by Arthur Wingfield. [9] With Wingfield,David Caplan,Gloria Waters,and others,Titone studied the impact of right-hemisphere brain damage [12] and cognitive aging [13] on sentence processing. During a subsequent postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School,Titone extended her research on language processing to individuals with schizophrenia,under the mentorship of Philip Holzman. [9] Their results suggested the language atypicalities in schizophrenia may be due to faulty inhibitory control as opposed to a lack of sensitivity to contextual cues. [14] [15] Other research focused on possible deficits in associative,relational learning in schizophrenia. [16]
Titone is a member of the Executive Board of the Centre for Research on Brain,Language &Music at McGill University,Universitédu Québec àMontréal,Concordia University,and Universitéde Montréal [17] and an associate member of the International Laboratory of Brain,Music,and Sound Research. [18] Her research has been supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. [19]
Titone's research program at McGill explores how people read,write,listen,and speak languages,possible advantages of bilingualism,and how the processing of multiple languages is different from monolingualism. [17] Her work has aimed to characterize the diversity of language experiences that people have and how this diversity reflects the human brain's capacity for language. [20] Titone's research on bilingualism,executive control,and aging suggests that bilinguals may experience multiple advantages in cognitive capacity as compared to monolinguals,which may stem from enhanced neurocognitive plasticity. [21]
A cognitive shift or shift in cognitive focus is triggered by the brain's response and change due to some external force.
Bilingualism,a subset of multilingualism,means having proficiency in two or more languages. A bilingual individual is traditionally defined as someone who understands and produces two or more languages on a regular basis. A bilingual individual's initial exposure to both languages may start in early childhood,e.g. before age 3,but exposure may also begin later in life,in monolingual or bilingual education. Equal proficiency in a bilingual individuals' languages is rarely seen as it typically varies by domain. For example,a bilingual individual may have greater proficiency for work-related terms in one language,and family-related terms in another language.
The lexical decision task (LDT) is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords.
Ellen Bialystok,OC,FRSC is a Canadian psychologist and professor. She carries the rank of Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto,Ontario where she is director of the Lifespan Cognition and Development Lab. She is also an associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.
Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener,who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
Robert Allen Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California,Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He is the creator of the directed forgetting paradigm. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Language production is the production of spoken or written language. In psycholinguistics,it describes all of the stages between having a concept to express and translating that concept into linguistic forms. These stages have been described in two types of processing models:the lexical access models and the serial models. Through these models,psycholinguists can look into how speeches are produced in different ways,such as when the speaker is bilingual. Psycholinguists learn more about these models and different kinds of speech by using language production research methods that include collecting speech errors and elicited production tasks.
Ping Li is currently Sin Wai Kin Professor in Humanities and Technology,Chair Professor of Neurolinguistics and Bilingual Studies,and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Prior to joining PolyU,he was a Professor of Psychology,Linguistics,and Information Sciences and Technology,and Associate Director of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are in language acquisition,bilingualism,and reading comprehension in both children and adults. He uses digital technologies and cognitive neuroscience methods to study neuroplasticity and individual differences in learning,so as to understand the relationships among languages,cultures,technology,and the brain. Li received a B.A. in Chinese linguistics from Peking University in 1983,an M.A. in theoretical linguistics from Peking University,a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics from Leiden University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in 1990,and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Center for Research in Language at the University of California,San Diego and the McDonnell-Pew Center for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience in 1992. Li has been employed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1992–1996),the University of Richmond (1996–2006),and Pennsylvania State University (2008–2019),and he has also served as Program Director for the Perception,Action,and Cognition Program and the Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the National Science Foundation (2007–2009). Li was also President of the Society for Computation in Psychology and is currently Editor of Brain and Language,Elsevier and Senior Editor of Cognitive Science,Wiley. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Judith F. Kroll is a Distinguished Professor of Language Science at University of California,Irvine. She specializes in psycholinguistics,focusing on second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. With Randi Martin and Suparna Rajaram,Kroll co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),the American Psychological Association (APA),the Psychonomic Society,the Society of Experimental Psychologists,and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
Sara J. Shettleworth is an American-born,Canadian experimental psychologist and zoologist. Her research focuses on animal cognition. She is professor emerita of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto.
Priming is a concept in psychology to describe how exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus,without conscious guidance or intention. The priming effect is the positive or negative effect of a rapidly presented stimulus on the processing of a second stimulus that appears shortly after. Generally speaking,the generation of priming effect depends on the existence of some positive or negative relationship between priming and target stimuli. For example,the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread. Priming can be perceptual,associative,repetitive,positive,negative,affective,semantic,or conceptual. Priming effects involve word recognition,semantic processing,attention,unconscious processing,and many other issues,and are related to differences in various writing systems. How quickly this effect occurs is contested;some researchers claim that priming effects are almost instantaneous.
Nelson Cowan is the Curators' Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. He specializes in working memory,the small amount of information held in mind and used for language processing and various kinds of problem solving. To overcome conceptual difficulties that arise for models of information processing in which different functions occur in separate boxes,Cowan proposed a more organically organized "embedded processes" model. Within it,representations held in working memory comprise an activated subset of the representations held in long-term memory,with a smaller subset held in a more integrated form in the current focus of attention. Other work has been on the developmental growth of working memory capacity and the scientific method. His work,funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1984,has been cited over 41,000 times according to Google Scholar. The work has resulted in over 250 peer-reviewed articles,over 60 book chapters,2 sole-authored books,and 4 edited volumes.
Philip Holzman (1922–2004) was the Esther and Sidney R. Rabb Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Harvard University and one of the world’s preeminent scientists in schizophrenia research. His landmark studies of oculomotor function documented the presence of abnormal smooth pursuit eye movements in individuals with schizophrenia and their clinically unaffected biological relatives. He was one of the first to investigate the genetic basis of schizophrenia. Another key contribution to the study of schizophrenia was his work on language and thought disorder in individuals with schizophrenia. He also discovered the presence of an active short-term memory deficit in people with schizophrenia and their biological relatives.
Dichotic listening is a psychological test commonly used to investigate selective attention and the lateralization of brain function within the auditory system. It is used within the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
The mental lexicon is a component of the human language faculty that contains information regarding the composition of words,such as their meanings,pronunciations,and syntactic characteristics. The mental lexicon is used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers' lexical,or word,representations. However,there is some disagreement as to the utility of the mental lexicon as a scientific construct.
Bilingualism is the regular use of two fluent languages,and bilinguals are those individuals who need and use two languages in their everyday lives. A person's bilingual memories are heavily dependent on the person's fluency,the age the second language was acquired,and high language proficiency to both languages. High proficiency provides mental flexibility across all domains of thought and forces them to adopt strategies that accelerate cognitive development. People who are bilingual integrate and organize the information of two languages,which creates advantages in terms of many cognitive abilities,such as intelligence,creativity,analogical reasoning,classification skills,problem solving,learning strategies,and thinking flexibility.
Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American psycholinguist,cognitive scientist,and psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders,and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the principal investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in psychology from Cornell University,and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language,cognition,the brain,and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic,cognitive,and neural architectures.
Bilingual lexical access is an area of psycholinguistics that studies the activation or retrieval process of the mental lexicon for bilingual people.
The word frequency effect is a psychological phenomenon where recognition times are faster for words seen more frequently than for words seen less frequently. Word frequency depends on individual awareness of the tested language. The phenomenon can be extended to different characters of the word in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese.
Núria Sebastián Gallés is a cognitive scientist known for her work on bilingual language development and the impact of bilingualism on cognition. She is Professor of Psychology at Pompeu Fabra University where she heads the Speech Acquisition and Perception (SAP) Research Group. In 2012,Sebastián Gallés received the Narcis Monturiol Medal as recognition of her scientific contributions. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2016.