Alumni

Christine Davison, MClSc

Biography / Research Interests: Christine has been a Speech Language Pathologist in clinical practice since graduating from Western University's M.Cl.Sc. program in 1995. Although she has a wide range of clinical experience, including many years of practice with the preschool population, her recent practice history has focused on school age children. Christine has worked with Thames Valley Children's Centre and the Thames Valley District School board, where she continues to practice on an occasional basis. She was a research SLP in the lab from 2018-2021.

Alexandra Cross, MSc, MClSc, PhD

Biography / Research Interests: Alex's research in the lab focused on reading development in children. She used MRI to examine brain connectivity and its relationship to reading disability. She completed her M.Sc. in Psychology at Western University and her B.Sc.H. in Psychology at Queen's University.

Taylor Bardell

Biography / Research Interests: Taylor was involved in practice-based research in the lab, working to examine and evaluate language intervention programs in schools. She graduated from Queen's University with a BSc in Psychology.

Mariam Dar, MA, PhD

Biography / Research Interests: Mariam Dar was a Postdoctoral Associate in the lab from 2019-2020. She earned her Ph.D and M.A in Psycholinguistics from the University of York, England. Mariam has extensive research experience with both typical and atypical language development in the early years. She created the first Infant Toddler Lab in her native Pakistan. She also developed the first language assessment tool for Pakistani children, a bilingual Urdu-English McArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) aimed for both research and clinical use (such as identifying speech delays, early diagnosis of disorders related to language delay, developing/modifying interventions and clinical treatments, etc.) Mariam has a wide range of cross-linguistic experience. She has worked as a Computational Linguist as a part of Al and Machine Learning Team for many leading firms for the process of creating speech technology, such as virtual agents, speech recognition and synthesis, and TTS (text-to-speech) lexicon. She has also been working as a Forensic Linguistic Researcher/Scientist providing Forensic Linguistic consulting for legal purposes.

Areej Balilah, PhD

Biography / Research Interests: Areej is an Assistant Professor in the Childhood Studies at the King AbdulAziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She pursued a Ph.D. in Speech and Language Science from Western University in Canada. She studies language development and impairment in monolingual and bilingual Arabic-speaking children. Her primary research interest is the assessment of monolingual Arabic-speaking children, and Arabic-English bilingual children.

Nicolette Noonan, PhD

Biography / Research Interests: Nicolette’s research in the LWM lab focused on exploring the process of statistical language learning. Using behavioural, clinical, and neuro-imaging approaches, she investigated whether statistical learning relies on domain-general cognitive process or language-specific processes. Part of her research focused on what differentiates a typical language learner from someone with a language learning impairment, and how statistical learning abilities contribute to these differences. Nicolette is currently the Sleep and Electrophysiology Laboratory Coordinator for BrainsCAN at Western.

Laura Pauls, MA, MClSc, PhD

Biography / Research Interests: In the LWM lab, Laura researched the intersection of language and working memory ability in children with impairments in one or both of these domains. To address this question, she looked at how language and working memory contribute to children's ability to recall stories and what the linguistic characteristics of these stories can tell us about the speakers' abilities. Her research also tested how children with language or working memory impairment respond to different types of intervention, including story-based language intervention and a computerized training program. Laura currently resides in Manitoba, where she works as a school-based speech-language pathologist.

Renata Lohmann, MA

Biography / Research Interests: Ren completed the master’s in Linguistics program at Western University in August 2018. Her research studied statistical language learning in school-aged children with either typically developing language or developmental language disorder (DLD, also known as Specific Language Impairment or SLI). Over the course of the Linguistics MA, Ren assisted in teaching classes in Language and Culture, Language Impairments, and Second Language Acquisition. Ren is reentering the job market with an interest in mediation and diversity in healthcare, education, or civil service for adults or children with communication related needs.

Braxton Murphy

Biography / Research Interests: Braxton Murphy is a third-year undergraduate student in Neuroscience and does research in the Lab through the Scholar’s Electives Program at Western. Under the supervision of Dr. Archibald, Braxton explores the applications of statistical language learning in large-scale artificial languages.