RSVP: PaGR - Postdoctoral & Graduate Research Day '26

The role of the Language mode in theory of mind: A Human Connectome Project functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI study (Ava Momeni)

Early Multilingual Experience Shapes Voice Quality Production: Evidence from Korean Heritage Speakers in Vancouver BC (Sylvia Cho)

Tracking the Beat: Exploring the role of Rhythmic Regularity in Early Word Learning (Erica Flaten)

Infants learn many of their first words from caregivers labeling objects in infant-directed (ID) speech. ID speech acoustically differs from adult-directed speech, including it being more rhythmic1–4. Rhythmicity is known to enhance attention and alignment of brain activity (neural tracking) to auditory input in adults5–8. Infants attend more to4,9,10, learn better from11–13, and show stronger neural tracking of ID than adult-directed speech14,15, but whether rhythmicity drives this remains unclear. Here we ask whether rhythmicity engages infants’ neural and cognitive processes in real-time to facilitate word learning. Infants (9-11 months; N = 40, data collection ongoing) from English-speaking homes were familiarized with two novel objects, each paired with a pseudoword (e.g., ‘Bap’, ‘Det’), while eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) were recorded. Words were repeated over an intonational phrase manipulated into patterns that were either rhythmically regular (fixed inter-word-intervals) or irregular (jittered intervals). At test, infants heard the taught pseudowords individually while viewing both objects. Looking times to the correct vs. incorrect object indexed learning. Analyses are ongoing, but initial results suggest infants may learn word-object associations similarly in the regular and irregular conditions but show stronger neural tracking for the regular condition. Importantly, we predict stronger neural tracking in the regular condition will predict more successful word learning with the full sample. Additionally, machine learning techniques will utilize infants’ multiple signals (e.g., eye-tracking, EEG) together to predict learning outcomes. By combining behavioral, neural, and computational approaches, this work will inform how rhythmicity shapes early language acquisition.

Racialized Integration and Anti-Asian Discourse in France: A Thematic Analysis of Reddit Discussions (Flora Chen)

LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation (Samar Mohamed Magdy)

Learner Investment and Identity: Multilingual Pathways Into German (Alexander Suyanto)

Abstract: This research examines why students who appear new to the German language and Germanophone culture choose to invest in learning German, shedding light on how such learners position themselves within the field and helping to make German Studies more relevant, accessible, and equitable for a broader and more diverse student population, including students of colour (Criser & Malakaj, 2020). Drawing on Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment, this qualitative study—part of my ongoing MA thesis—investigates how individuals who grew up with a non-European language and later became proficient in English negotiate their identities, assert their legitimacy, and make use of their symbolic and material resources in learning German. Learners invest in a language because they expect it to expand their identities and opportunities, not simply for utilitarian or economic reasons. Participants include three young adults with prior experience learning German in a university setting. They speak one or more non-European languages at home, learned English as an additional language, and are now maintaining German at an intermediate to advanced level. Data collection consists of a short written questionnaire and a semi-structured audio-recorded interview. A thematic analysis of the interviews identifies patterns related to investment, identity, ideology, and emotion in their language-learning trajectories. Data collection is complete, and analysis is underway. By examining learners who add German to an already multilingual repertoire, the study demonstrates how issues of power, identity, and belonging intersect and interact within complex linguistic contexts. The findings may also inform pedagogical and curricular practices in German Studies and support broader discussions about inclusion and linguistic diversity in higher education. 

The Exemplarist Case for Reweighted Duration Cues in the Implementation of HVPT for the L2 Acquisition of Tense-Lax Contrast in English (Steve Hundiak)

The tense-lax vowel contrast is a common area of difficulty for L2 learners of English. Prior studies have examined and ultimately shown the efficacy of High Variability Phonetic/Pronunciation Training (HVPT) in overcoming this difficulty through artificially modified cues. However, largely it has been argued that it is more beneficial to modify spectral cues rather than duration cues. This in-progress work reexamines four HVPT studies (Iverson et al., 2011; Qin & Archibald, 2022; Rato, 2014; Ylinen et al., 2010) from the perspective of Exemplar Theory to argue that initial category formation for tense-lax vowel contrasts may be aided more by modified durative cues. In studies that showed spectral modification to be beneficial, all participants had been learning English for five or more years, indicating an already-robust system of mental categorization for the phonology of the language. As such, duration cue modification cannot be discounted as a benefit to beginner L2 learners of English, as initial duration cue reliance is common for beginner learners for whom spectral cues are not immediately discernible (Bohn, 1995). While the status of the effectiveness of modifying duration cues for beginners is presently unclear as this is still untested, this paper highlights an unexplored area of cue-modified HVPT and provides a future direction for research and second language pedagogy.

Chosen Words: Negotiating Registers of Kazakh and Russian in Astana (Kazakhstan) (Éléonore Guy)

This paper is concerned with the linguistic ideologies supporting the use of Kazakh and Russian in Astana. This research is based on a three-month ethnographic fieldwork, involving observations of the linguistic landscape and of languaging practices that I contrasted with life story interviews. Russian is the privileged language in public contexts (ie schools, workplaces, medias), indexing Soviet discourses that established it as the lingua franca. Astana residents mainly speak Kazakh in contexts considered as rural, familial or traditional. A variety of speech that includes many borrowings and calques from Russian emerged from using the language in those contexts, which I describe as the domestic register. Centuries of colonial and orientalist discourses have resulted in the stigmatization of Kazakh ethnicity and, by association, of the domestic register. To separate the Kazakh language from the stigma attached to the domestic form, recent linguistic revitalization initiatives are developing a purist register that I describe as institutional. Because this register serves to perform state independence, a passing knowledge of institutional Kazakh is required for all public employment. This creates an incentive to learn Kazakh, but also linguistic anxiety. Multiple people drew my attention to the ripple effects of the Russo-Ukrainian war and showed me they had been making efforts to “speak more Kazakh”. I conclude with an opening, bridging on how my most recent project builds on this research to examine what it means to speak Russian in this shifting context, where young people are reenvisioning the links between language and national belonging.

Digital Literacy Lessons on School Integration: An Arts-Based, Community-Engaged Approach to Newcomer Stories in the Classroom (Linnea F.)

Operationalizing Bilingual Engagement: Associations Between Language Experience and Emotional Perception Accuracy (Qusai Qublan)

Research on bilingualism and emotion has frequently relied on categorical contrasts such as language dominance. Experience-based models instead conceptualize bilingualism as a continuum shaped by language use, proficiency, and attitudes (Grosjean, 2010; Birdsong, 2018). This study examines whether continuous dimensions of bilingual engagement are associated with emotional perception accuracy and tests the hypothesis that greater second-language engagement co-varies with higher performance on a non-verbal emotion recognition task. A total of 143 Arabic–English bilingual adults residing in Jordan completed the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP), a questionnaire measuring language history, use, proficiency, and attitudes, and an Emotional Perception Task consisting of short silent video clips depicting basic emotions. Emotional perception was indexed through accuracy scores. Given non-normal distributions, Spearman’s rho correlations were conducted. English proficiency showed a small but statistically significant positive association with emotional perception accuracy (ρ ≈ .18). English use demonstrated similar positive associations, whereas language history showed weaker relationships. These findings align with research suggesting that emotional processing varies across languages depending on experiential factors (Dewaele, 2004; Pavlenko, 2012). No causal claims are advanced. The study demonstrates how bilingual experience can be operationalized dimensionally rather than categorically, contributing methodological clarity to interdisciplinary research on language and emotion.

WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and Minority Language Editions

On the efficacy of out-of-domain dialectal Arabic data for finetuning ASR models(Peter Sullivan)

"I Cannot Connect with Them, I Cannot Communicate with Them": An Arts-Based Ethnographic Exploration of Newcomer Youth Language Learning Experiences in a Canadian High School (Yasmin Elliott)

Experimental evidence for implicational relationships among sC clusters (Danica Reid)

Early language acquisition, deaf children, academic ASL, expansive ASL, elements of language (Alayna Finley)

Researcher reflexivity: Examining EAL teachers’ translanguaging stance through a social constructionist lens (Serikbolsyn Tastanbek)

Cue weighting in monolingual and bilingual infants' word segmentation (Helen Shiyang Lu)

Identifying word boundaries in running speech is one of the first steps in language development. However, natural speech does not contain clear acoustic markers separating words. To solve this, infants can rely on cues such as statistical regularities (how often one syllable follows another) and language-specific prosodic patterns (e.g., the strong-weak stress pattern typical of English words like “BAby”). As they develop, monolingual infants learn to prioritize cues relevant to their native language. Far less is known about how this unfolds in bilingual infants, even though most of the world is bi-/multi-lingual. Bilingual infants must navigate two linguistic systems that may provide different or even conflicting signals. We examined whether 9-month-old English-Cantonese bilingual infants flexibly adjust their reliance on statistical versus prosodic cues depending on language context. English monolinguals (n=16) and English-Cantonese bilinguals (n=13) completed a word-segmentation task in which statistical and prosodic cues pointed to different word boundaries. Infants were tested in two contexts: one using English syllables and one using Cantonese syllables. Responses were measured using pupillometry, a non-invasive and sensitive physiological method that indexes processing effort and familiarity through changes in pupil diameter. Preliminary findings suggest that bilingual infants shift their weighting of statistical cues across language contexts (p=.035), whereas monolingual infants do not show this context-dependent pattern for either cue. These results indicate that early bilingual experience may foster flexible, adaptive speech processing. More broadly, pupillometry offers a sensitive tool for assessing early language learning and may hold promise for early identification of atypical developmental trajectories. 

Where Ideology Meets the Signal: Language Standardness, Voice Similarity, and Intelligibility in Bilingual Speech Processing (Suyuan Liu)

Understanding speech involves more than processing sounds. Listeners also draw on prior experiences and social beliefs when interpreting what they hear (e.g. Babel, 2010; Sumner et al., 2014). Do listeners have an easier time understanding people who speak more standard? What about someone who has a voice similar to our own? This dissertation addresses these questions with a focus on Mandarin-English bilinguals through the Mandarin-English Language Interview (MELI) Corpus. Using interviews, perceptual rating tasks, and acoustic analyses from 51 bilingual participants, this study investigates how perceived standardness and listener-talker voice similarity influence intelligibility, evaluated through a sentence in noise transcription task. The results show that voices acoustically similar to a listener are more intelligible in both languages. Perceived standardness also facilitates speech processing. However, the degree of facilitation of perceived standardness differs between Mandarin and English, reflecting differences in how bilingual speakers define and evaluate what counts as “standard”. Specifically, perceived standardness facilitate intelligibility more in English than in Mandarin. This correlates how, through a thematic analysis, the same group of Mandarin-English bilinguals define “standardness” as a more social construct in Mandarin context while equating it more to communication efficiency, and hence, intelligibility in English. These findings demonstrate that speech understanding is shaped by both acoustic structure and social evaluation, and that research decisions play a role in how such constructs are defined and analyzed. 

Embodiesments of Water: on Plurilingual-Pluricultural Identities Through Memory and Language Learning-Teaching (Anisa Maya Dhanji)

This thesis reveals the embodiesments of water as a metaphorical and methodological current for understanding plurilingual-pluricultural identities across landscapes of memory work, language learning-teaching, and being-becoming. Through arts-based self-study, I weave together narratives of poetry, visual arts, and critical reflections to examine how my personal and professional identities as an artist-researcher-teacher-learner dwell in English, French, and the absences of my heritage languages. Anchored in theoretical shorelines of sociolinguistics, poststructuralism, anticolonial thought, and environmental education, the bodies of my work unsettle monolingual and monocultural paradigms by centering the fluid, relational, and transformeative natures of language-culture identities. Memory work becomes a shoreline where tensions of linguistic insecurities, colonial legacies, and diasporic grieving meet liberations found in plurilanguaging, multimodalities, and anti-oppressive teaching practices. Water, as bodies, metaphor, and teacher sustains this inquiry: it embodies fluidity, opacity, and resilience, while inviting ethical reflection on language learning-teaching in relation to land, community, and justice. This research contributes to plurilingual-pluricultural education by proposing that language learning-teaching can be moving practices of estuarial confluences by joining together histoires, identities, and pedagogies that are continually transformeing.

A Task-Based Functional MRI (fMRI) Double Dissociation of Language and Visual Feature Processing in the Midnight Scan Club

Language Equity in Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI): A Deaf-Centred Project ECHO Model (Alayna Finley)