Current and Former Members
Principal Investigators
Dr. Elena Nicoladis
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Dr. Elena Nicoladis is a full professor at the University of Alberta.
She is interested in how bilingual/bicultural children learn the appropriate norms for their community as seen through their language use, particularly in the context of their family. She is also interested in what bilingual children can tell us about language acquisition in terms of early words, morphology, and gesture. University of Alberta Faculty Page |
Dr. Paula Marentette
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Dr. Paula Marentette is a full professor at University of Alberta
Augustana. Her research focuses on the use of gesture in storytelling situations as well as children's acquisition of American Sign Language as a first language. Both gesture and signed languages are tools that psycholinguists use to understand the functions of the human mind. University of Alberta Faculty Page |
Current Members
Anahita Shokrkon
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Anahita Shokrkon is a graduate student completing her second year of the PhD program. She completed her Master's degree at the University of Tehran in psychology (clinical psychology). Because of her interest in developmental psychology, she focused on social and emotional development of children for her master's thesis. Her current research focuses on language development.
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Yasmine Abdel Razek
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Yasmine is in her fourth year of her BA degree in psychology and is in her second year of the honours program. She joined the GLAD lab because she wanted to explore what factors express how a person communicates their ideas. She is interested in understanding what promotes creativity and divergent thinking, and how this can be shown through the expression of language. |
Avnit Dhanoa
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Avnit is in her third year of her Bsc in Honours Psychology. Avnit’s been in the GLAD lab since PSYCO 299 and she is currently pursuing her honours thesis which focuses on rapport and common ground amongst bilinguals. She is interested in how language plays a role in clinical settings.
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Nicol Garzón Mahecha
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Nicol is in her third year of her BA honours psychology degree, currently conducting research regarding language identity in minority settings. Nicol’s interest in children’s development led her to find and eventually joining the GLAD lab. While researching and writing her honours thesis, she has also found a newfound love for the very intricate, yet captivating, processes surrounding language research.
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Hunter Volk
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Hunter Volk is in his third year of his BA in Psychology and first year in honours. Hunter joined the GLAD lab because he wanted to research the connection between verb tense use and how individuals speak about their emotional autobiographical narratives. He hopes for his research to lead to practical applications in clinical and counselling psychology. |
Emily Young
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Emily is in her third year of her BA in the Honours Psychology program. Her interests include special populations, communication modalities, and how these modalities work in practice. Her prospective research will look at gesture comprehension in the elderly population with an emphasis on real world applications. |
Narimane Dahou
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Narimane completed her BSc Psychology degree with a minor in Sociology in Spring, 2020. Her interest in nonverbal communication first brought her to the GLAD Lab in early 2018 as an Independent Study student. Currently, she is interested in investigating the emotional and cultural differences in autobiographical memory. Narimane is the current lab coordinator.
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Mariah Allarie
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Mariah Allarie is a 4th year student at the University of Alberta. She is pursuing a bachelor of science degree with honours in psychology. After completing her undergraduate degree she wishes to complete a Masters and PhD in clinical or counseling psychology. Mariah is interested in researching how children's autobiographical memories are formed and altered.
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Aroob Qureshi
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Aroob is in the third year of her BSc in Psychology and first year in Honours. After taking PYSCO 223 with Dr. Nicoladis, her interests in developmental psychology and autobiographical memory led her to join the GLAD lab. Currently, she is researching and writing her honors thesis possibly involving bilingual children and memory of events.
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Dawna Anderson
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Dawna Anderson is in her third year of taking the BSc in Honours Psychology program. She completed her first two years of the program at Red Deer College and has transferred to the University of Alberta in September 2020 to continue her studies. Dawna is currently researching how Parkinson’s disease impacts language and non-verbal communication for her honours thesis.
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Samantha Newman
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Samantha is a third-year student looking to obtain an Honors Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology. Her area of interest is nonverbal communication and the role that it plays in attraction as well as the benefit of understanding nonverbal communication for counseling.
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Bayimkhanim Bahmani
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Bayimkhanim Bahmani graduated from the Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey. She earned a BS degree in Psychology (2019), and a Minor degree in Biology (2020). It is her first year in masters degree under the supervision of Prof. Nicoladis in University of Alberta, Developmental Psychology. She is also a research assistant in GLAD lab. She is highly interested in the interplay of language and gestures across different age groups.
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Sara Moncion Sepulveda
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Sara Moncion is a 3rd year BA psychology honours. This will be her first year in the GLAD lab. She is very interested in finding what are the best ways to maintain L2 in families, after they have moved to Canada. And this is what she will be conducting her research on. After she obtains her degree in psychology, she would like to pursue a career in developmental psychology or counselling psychology.
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Former Members
Rikka Paular
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Rikka Paular completed a BSc Psychology degree with a minor in Sociology in Spring, 2019. She has completed different studies with the GLAD lab during her undergrad, exploring second language acquisition with adults and informal learning with children. Rikka is currently pursuing her Masters in Educational Psychology, LDIS at the University of Victoria.
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Ava Funkhouser
Bryce Hoy
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Ava Funkhouser is an undergraduate student in the Psychology Honours program at the University of Alberta. Ava’s interest in learning and language brought her to the GLAD lab in early 2018 to complete a 299. Ava’s prospective research will focus on the difference between monologue and dialogue communication, and the efficacy of each style for learning abstract concepts. |
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Bryce Hoy completed a BA Psychology (Honours) with the Culture and Cognition Lab in 2018 and was the lab coordinator for the GLAD Lab from July 2018-2019. Bryce's past research has addressed cross cultural differences in social anxiety, gestural hand preference and children's working memory. Bryce is now pursing her masters in School and Clinical Child Psychology at University of Alberta. |
Kai Huang
Rielle Gagnon
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Kai completed a BSc Psychology (Honours) degree in Spring, 2019. With a passion for language and being a bilingual speaker herself, she joined the GLAD lab to further explore her interests in language development and bilingualism. Her current research looked at the emotional differences between the first and second languages in bilinguals, specifically examining whether it is the age at when people learn their language or how proficient they are that determines how much emotion they feel in that language.
Rielle Gagnon completed a BSc Psychology (Honours) degree in Spring, 2019. Rielle's music background and interest in memory brought her to the GLAD Lab in Fall 2017. Rielle's research investigated how formal music training influences the working memory structure of musicians compared to that of non- musicians. She is interested in exploring whether music can meld working memory components into a more cohesive and integrative structure.
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Shiva Zarezade
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Shiva Zarezade was a graduate student at the Ferdowsi University of Iran completing her fourth year of a PhD Psychology. Shiva is a child Psychologist in her country and was a visiting researcher at the University of Alberta. She joined the GLAD Lab in winter 2018. Her dissertation focuses children's visual-spatial development. She is currently researching how Farsi/English bilinguals' visuo-spatial short term memory (VS-STM) and visuo-spatial working memory (VS-WM) are different in bilingual children, and how it can effect their language development.
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Rebecca Stuber
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Rebecca Stuber completed a BA Psychology (Honours) degree with the GLAD lab in 2018, and acted as lab coordinator from April-July of 2018. Her history of music and language brought her to the GLAD Lab in Fall 2016. A love of music influenced Rebecca's research, as her undergrad thesis looked at how children learn affective meaning in music, a question that extends to how children learn the meaning behind language.
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Robyn Enns
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Robyn Enns completed her MSc Candidate in Psychology (Developmental Science) at the University of Alberta. She has a Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a minor in Spanish from the University of Lethbridge. Her thesis studied language development in people with autism. |
Lorelei Baquiran
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Lorelei completed a BSc Honours degree at the University of Alberta with the GLAD Lab. Lorelei's general research interests include developmental science, language, and autobiographical memory. Her undergrad thesis explored the effects of exposure to manipulated medical diagnoses and linguistic cues, particularly foreign and standard Canadian English speech accents, on perceptions of physicians. She wass also involved in a study that examines source monitoring in children.
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Jessie Bee Kim Koh
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Dr. Jessie Bee Kim Koh was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include areas of narrative, self-development and well-being. She is particularly interested in the extended self, which is built on personal narratives of past experiences and future happenings. Her research focused on the socialization and development of extended self in socio-cultural contexts and the implications for social and emotional outcomes. Specifically, she studied narrative skills development in different cultural and language contexts, and the role that such skills play on the development of the extended self.
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Catherine Zoleta
Catherine Zoleta was a Lab Manager of the GLAD Lab and
Psychology BA graduate from the University of Alberta.
She worked on multiple projects, such as bilingual communication
and gestures, and parental reports on language dominance. She is
now pursuing a doctorate in clinical child psychology in the United
States.
Poliana Barbosa
Poliana Barbosa was an associate professor in Psychology
(Developmental Science) at the University of Alberta. Her research
interests revolve around the question: How do infants start to use
language? She is interested on the mechanisms underpinning
one-word utterances and gestures acquisition, specifically, in how
infants figure out that humans are intentional beings. She
completed her PhD with the Gesture and Language
Development Lab.
(Developmental Science) at the University of Alberta. Her research
interests revolve around the question: How do infants start to use
language? She is interested on the mechanisms underpinning
one-word utterances and gestures acquisition, specifically, in how
infants figure out that humans are intentional beings. She
completed her PhD with the Gesture and Language
Development Lab.
Brandi Bowers
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Brandi Bowers was a Psychology undergraduate student minoring in Native Studies with an embedded certificate in Aboriginal Governance and Partnership. Her area of interest is the role of culture in psychological development. She was involved in coding of study results for Poliana Barbosa. |
Elise Iwaniuk
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Elise Iwaniuk was an undergraduate student at the University of Alberta currently completing her fourth year of a BSc specializing in psychology. She began working as a research assistant in the GLAD lab in May 2015, and has since transitioned into completing two PSYCO 496 projects within the lab in Fall 2016 and Winter 2017. Her projects have included studying differences in storytelling between monolingual and bilingual children, and the effects of cultural background on gesture use in adults as a function of discourse type.
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Jasmine Aziz
Jasmine Azizw was an undergraduate Psychology student at the
University of Alberta. Coming from a French Immersion
background, Jasmine was interested in how bilingual adults
communicate in their two languages, particularly in terms of their
gesture and verb use. She ran a study on
communication styles of French-English and Farsi-English
bilinguals.
University of Alberta. Coming from a French Immersion
background, Jasmine was interested in how bilingual adults
communicate in their two languages, particularly in terms of their
gesture and verb use. She ran a study on
communication styles of French-English and Farsi-English
bilinguals.
Dr. Zixia Jiang
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Dr. Zixia Jiang was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. She is interested in child language development, with special focus on compounding and morphological acquisition. She was currently studying how cognitive abilities are related to language abilities in English-Mandarin bilingual children.
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Nicole Denise Salvador
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Nicole Denise Salvador was a Psychology (Honours)
student at the University of Alberta. Because of her intense fascination on language acquisition and bilingualism, she has started unraveling, through her undergraduate thesis, how siblings influence the language choice of bilingual children. She hopes that the results will provide a bigger picture on how [bilingual] language development is shaped by social interactions. |
Yondu Mori
Yondu Mori was a PSYCO 496 student and NSERC Summer research
student. She is interested in studying gestures, in order to better
understand the relationship between language and motor
processes, and its potential therapeutic applications. She has
worked with children examining predictors for individual
differences in their gesturing, and with Mandarin-English
bilinguals examining the effect of language dominance on their
pantomimes of near-synonym throw verbs.
student. She is interested in studying gestures, in order to better
understand the relationship between language and motor
processes, and its potential therapeutic applications. She has
worked with children examining predictors for individual
differences in their gesturing, and with Mandarin-English
bilinguals examining the effect of language dominance on their
pantomimes of near-synonym throw verbs.
Dr. Reyhan Furman
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Dr. Reyhan Furman was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of
Alberta. The central focus of her research is discovering how speech and gesture come together to form language. In particular, she asks how speech and gesture both interact with and shape each other in development. She aims to discover how this multimodal interaction furthers our understanding of cognition and language. |
Dr. Lisa Smithson
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Dr. Lisa Smithson's research interests revolve around gestures, language, and working memory. Specifically, she is interested in how gestures influence speech production and how working memory affects gesture production. |
Dr. Jaya Nagpal
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Dr. Jaya Nagpal is currently pursuing a MBA at the University of
Chicago with focus on Marketing and Analytics. She is interested in the application of psychological principles and research methods in marketing. After completing her PhD from the University of Alberta, she taught developmental psychology and research methods at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. She has conducted research in the area of acculturation, language development and gesture use in children. |
Dr. Angélique Laurent
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Dr. Angélique Laurent is assistant professor at the Université de
Sherbrooke. Her research interests are language acquisition (phonological and syntactic awareness) in bilingual children, the relationship between gestures and speech in bilinguals (children and adults), and working memory in bilingual and monolingual children. |
Dr. Maria Garziano
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Dr. Maria Garziano is a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Lab at
the Lund University. Her research focuses on the link between the ability to use different kinds of gestures and the development of cognitive, pragmatic and textual abilities; the development of rhythmic coordination between gesture and speech in bilingual children; and the way in which gestures are deployed in relation to various kinds of speech disfluencies. |
Dr. Simone Pika
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Dr. Simone Pika is the head of the Humboldt Research Group
"Evolution of communication" at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. Her research primarily focuses on adding to the big picture question how coordinated communication and underlying cognitive skills in sophisticated societies developed and evolved. To do so, she is studying gestural and multi-modal combinations in three model systems: (1) children of human cultures; (2) closely related species (great apes); and (3) species living in comparable social settings (corvids, great apes). |
Huong Hoang
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Huong Hoang is currently pursuing a Masters in Speech Language Pathology at McGill University. As a trilingual, she has always been interested in how language is intricately interwoven with both culture and identity. Huong has explored tense use in the stories of French-English bilingual children, as well as the effect of language dominance on Mandarin-English bilinguals’ conception of throw verbs.
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