Lab News

Have you ever faced bias based on your accent? Tune in to this episode on CBC Listen to learn about Dr. Elizabeth Johnson's research on accent bias in young children and how accents are portrayed in the media they watch.

Congratulations to post doc Thomas St. Pierre and SSHRC-UTEA recipient Kaitlyn Harris on their talk presented at the Psychonomic Society Meeting in Boston! And congratulations to Thomas on his recent paper published in Cognitive Development!

Ever wondered when gender differences in speech start to develop? If so, listen to PhD student Priscilla Fung discuss her research on gendered speech on the Across Acoustics Podcast.

Congratulations to the 8 of our undergraduate students who presented at the 2022 UTM Summer Undergraduate Research Fair!

Good luck to Professor Johnson in her new role as an Associate Editor for the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics!

Congratulations to Kaitlyn Harris (recipient of the SSHRC-UTEA) and Jessica Hira (recipient of the NSERC-USRA)! These prestigious awards will enable Kaitlyn and Jessica to carry out their own research in our lab this summer!

New paper accepted for publication in Language Learning and Development: The influence of accent distance on perceptual adaptation in toddlers and adults.

Congratulations to Thomas St. Pierre and Félix Desmeules-Trudel on successful presentations at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD)

New paper published in Cognitive Science: Looking for wugs in all the right places: Children's use of prepositions in word learning 

New paper published in Cognitive Science: The other accent effect in talker recognition: now you see it, now you don't. 

Dr. Félix Desmeules-Trudel was interviewed by Marjorie April from Y a pas deux matins pareils CBC/Radio-Canada ICI Toronto! 

The CLASS Lab is hiring! We have a post doc opening as well as one fully funded PhD spot. For more information on applying to our PhD program, click here. For more information on our post doc opening, click here!

Congratulations to postdoc Dr. Thomas St. Pierre on accepting a professorship at Utrecht Univeristy! We wish him luck as he starts this new chapter of his life and can’t wait to see all the great work he will do in his new position!

Welcome to our newest PhD student, Emily Shroads (left)! And a big congratulations to Jida Jaffan (right) who has been awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship to fund her research on children’s interactions with humans and robots!

Congratulations to PhD student Priscilla Fung for being awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship at the University of Toronto. We look forward to seeing the results of your thesis work on bilingual language development.

Congratulations to Josie Davies (Cardiff University) and Eason Shum (University of Hong Kong) for winning Mitacs Globalink Research Internships to work in our lab this summer!

New paper accepted for publication in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: How sociolinguistic factors shape children's subjective impressions of teacher quality.

New paper accepted for publication (January 2022) in Annual Review of Linguistics: Navigating accent variation: A developmental perspective. 

Our lab has been awarded a new CFI grant entitled Baby Brain and Behaviour Lab (BaBBL):  electrophysiological measures of infant speech and language development.

Congratulations to our postdoctoral researcher Félix Desmeules-Trudel on his new job as a bilingual knowledge mobilization specialist at Research Impact Canada.

Our lab has received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant entitled:  Examining the developmental roots of language-based social biases.

In collaboration with Jessamyn Schertz, we have received an NSERC Research Tools and Infrastructure Grant: Using eye-tracking and in-depth video analysis to understand how speech input relates to speech development.