Talk: Is there a bilingual cognitive advantage in executive functions?

A talk by Professor Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia University, Montréal.

Where: May 4th, 15:00, the Department of Psychology's canteen (meeting room 03.2.M202). 

Bilingual people are often claimed to have an advantage over monolingual people in cognitive processing owing to their ability to learn and use two languages. This advantage is considered to be related to executive functions (EF). However, no consensus exists as to when this advantage emerges. I will report a body of work from my lab that examines the bilingual cognitive advantage in toddlers.

The talk is open to all.

Dr. Diane Poulin-Dubois received her Ph.D from Université de Montréal and completed postdoctoral training at McGill and Harvard University. She is a Full professor of Psychology at Concordia University. She currently holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Developmental Cybernetics. She has been awarded the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University in 2007 and the Concordia University Research Fellowship in 2012. She is the recipient of the 2019 Pickering Award for Outstanding Contributions to Developmental Psychology in Canada and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Professor Poulin-Dubois is internationally known for her theoretical and empirical contributions on cognitive and language development. Her research, which is currently funded by NSERC and SSHRC, concerns the early acquisition of a theory of mind, selective learning, conceptual categories, the cognitive benefits of early bilingualism and childrobot interactions. She is the author of more than 150 publications.