Current Lab Members

Fall 2021

Elizabeth Johnson

Lab Director

Dr. Johnson received her undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester where she majored in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and completed a Take Five program in Developmental Biology & Evolution. She then went on to earn her PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University. During her final year as a PhD student, Dr. Johnson spent two semesters at the Speech Group at MIT. Dr. Johnson then accepted a postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Dr. Johnson is now a Canada Research Chair in Spoken Language Acquisition and Professor of Psychology at UTM. She is also Director of the University of Toronto's Tri-Campus Graduate Program in Psychology. The main goal of her research program is to understand how young children acquire their native language.

Thomas St. Pierre

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Postdoctoral Researcher

Research Interests: Adaptation, processing L2 speech, language attitudes, reference, influence of extralinguistic factors on processing in children and adults

Priscilla Fung

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PhD Candidate (Year 3)

Research Interests: Language acquisition in early childhood bilingualism, relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development

Madeleine Yu

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PhD Candidate (Year 3)

Research Interests: Multilingual effects on language acquisition and perception, speaker recognition, music and language processing, auditory-visual speech processing

Jida Jaffan

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PhD Candidate (Year 2), co-supervised with Craig Chambers

Research Interests: Psycholinguistics! How individual differences (e.g. empathy) can impact child language development and how children and robots use language to interact and learn

Lisa Hotson

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Research Lab Co-ordinator

Research Experience: Research assistant in Dr. Laurel Trainor's Auditory Development Lab, research assistant in Dr. Sandra Trehub's Music Development Lab.