Promoting research excellence
Part of Poulin-Dubois’ research looks at early cognitive and language development in babies. As a language lover, this focus drew Ilana Frank to pursue her master’s degree and PhD in the Department of Psychology with Poulin-Dubois in the Cognitive and Language Development lab.
Frank says the questionnaire began as a research tool. The team wanted to study the language and cognitive development of bilingual and monolingual children. In order to do this, they would need to adapt existing English-language assessments into Québécois French.
The final step in adapting the questionnaire, says Poulin-Dubois, was to determine how many words a child understands at a given age. This step is called validation and normalization and is required if the questionnaire is to be used by clinicians, she explains, because it creates a baseline to compare against.
“Our first source was the English version,” says Frank. “And our second source came from another study done by Diane and others in her lab on children’s play, which yielded a database of words we could draw from.”
This ensured that the language would reflect the community they were measuring — in this case, francophone Montrealers, Frank notes.
She says she was excited when Poulin-Dubois told her that the research is being leveraged today to support children’s success.
“Although it was a lot of hard work, a lot of working on the weekends, the atmosphere was so stimulating. Everyone’s goal in the lab was to help each other and to raise that research to a slightly higher level each time,” says Frank.
“My years at Concordia were some of the best in my life.”
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