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Health Communication: An Australia-Canada collaboration

This Australian Research Council funded international collaboration is designed to understand communication of health risk when the health practitioner and patient do not share the same first language. The groups involved are English- and Chinese-speakers in Australia and English- and French-speakers in Canada.  For more information, see the project's Newsletters:  1    2 .    

Cognitive bases of second language (L2) fluency

These projects address the cognitive bases of fluency in the L2. We focus on how the cognitive fluency (speed, efficiency of mental processing) of lexical access, linguistic attention, phonologicial memory and language-related executive control underlie aspects of L2 utterance fluency (temporal phenomena such as speech rate and hesitations). We are investigating new ways of identifying the relevant variables, and how best to elicit L2 speech samples for such research.

HCALM - Health Care Access for Linguistic Minorities

These projects address communication barriers between patients and health professionals not sharing a first language. Our recent results have revealed an aspect of communication anxiety specific to such language discordant situations, over and above general second language anxiety and general health communication anxiety. We are currently working with English-, French-, Chinese- and Russian-speaking minority groups in Canada. For more information, go to HCALM-Network.

MILI - Montreal Indicators of Linguistic Integration

This project addresses ways of assessing the structure of social communication networks of linguistic minority populations with respect to the majority or mainstream group. We are interested in how these networks affect minority group members' acquisition of the mainstream group's language, their integration into the mainstream community, and how language and social integration affect psychosocial well-being.

L2 Productive Vocabulary

These studies address new ways of assessing the size and nature of speakers' second language (L2) productive vocabulary. We are exploring ways of adapting statistical procedures from population ecology used to study the size of animal populations to applications for determining the size of a person's L2 productive vocabulary.

If you would like to join our lab, as a volunteer or thesis student at the undergraduate or graduate level, please let us know by sending an email from the Contact page.

 

Si vous désirez vous joindre à notre laboratoire, en tant que bénévole ou étudiant en thèse au niveau de premier cycle ou de cycle supérieur, veuillez envoyer un courriel (voir la page Coordonnées).

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