Leah Gosselin

University of Ottawa · Department of Linguistics

Previous research suggests that native listeners may be more tolerant to syntactic errors when they are produced in a foreign accent. However, studies investigating this topic within the semantic domain remain conflicting. The current study examined the effects of mispronunciations leading to semantic abnormality in foreign-accented speech. While t...

A bank of past electrophysiological research suggests that code-switching (i.e., the use of multiple languages during a single conversational event) is characterized by increased processing costs. However, the majority of these studies tested bilinguals who did not necessarily code-switch on a regular basis. In order to investigate the impact of sw...

Classic linguistic models, such as Chomsky’s minimalist schematization of the human language faculty, were typically based on a ‘monolingual ideal’. More recently, models have been extended to bilingual cognition. For instance, MacSwan (2000) posited that bilinguals possess a single syntactic computational system and, crucially, two (or more) phono...

In psycholinguistics, a thorny debate concerns the impact of individuals’ language background on their cognitive abilities. Many studies (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2012) suggest that bilingualism could confer certain advantages for the brain’s executive functions—particularly those related to ‘cognitive control’, the general ability to focus on goal-...

In our continuously globalizing world, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communications are far from exceptional. A wealth of research has indicated that the processing of non-native accented speech can be challenging for native listeners, both at the level of phonology (e.g., Munro & Derwing, 1995) and syntax (Caffarra & Martin, 2019). However,...

During the last two decades, psycholinguists have ardently debated the putative cognitive costs associated to the practice of bilingual code-switching. One often neglected parameter in this literature concerns the distinction between multi-word switches, single-word switches, and nonce- borrowings. Just like single-word switches, nonce-borrowings a...