Debra Titone


Professor / Canada Research Chair in Language & Multilingualism (Tier I)

Research Themes:  Evolving Language in an Information Economy, Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism, The Communicating Mind and Body

Psychology, Faculty of Science,  McGill University

Professor Titone conducts behavioral (e.g., eye-tracking), sociolinguistic (e.g., social network analysis, linguistic landscape), and, less frequently, neuroimaging (e.g., ERP, MRI) experiments to investigate some of the following questions:

  • How do bilinguals resolve within-language and cross-language ambiguity during written and spoken language comprehension?
  • How do individual differences in executive function, and other cognitive capacities, modulate language comprehension and production, and vice versa?
  • What sociolinguistic/social network/theory of mind factors impact first and second language processing, and vice versa?
  • How do first and second language users learn, represent and process figurative language?
  • Are bilingual experience and ability associated with structural and functional brain changes in younger and older adults?
  • How do neuropathological/neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., schizophrenia, dyslexia) affect language processes such as skilled reading? 

Research Areas: Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience, Behavioral Neuroscience

First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that UBC’s campuses are situated within the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and in the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples.


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