Profile of: Isabelle Boucher

Award received: NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Masters

Awarded for the project: Relationship Between Phonological Processing and Reading Behaviour in Monolingual and Bilingual Children and Adults: An Eye-Tracking Investigation

Department: Psychology

Supervisor: Dr. Veronica Whitford

How do bilinguals process written language in real time, and does this process differ from monolingual readers? Reading is a foundational skill that underpins academic achievement, yet the cognitive mechanisms that support reading, particularly phonological processing (knowledge of a language’s sound structure) remain poorly understood across development and linguistic backgrounds.

This gap is especially pronounced for bilingual readers, who must navigate multiple sound systems while learning to read. Despite bilingualism being more prevalent than monolingualism globally, little is known about how phonological processing in both languages affect reading fluency.

My research addresses this gap by examining how L1 and L2 phonological processing shape real-time reading behaviour in monolingual and bilingual children (ages 7-12) and young adults (ages 18-21). Using eye-tracking, this work will capture moment-to-moment reading processes as participants silently read short texts.

Participants will also complete standardized assessments of phonological processing in English and French, allowing the relationship between phonological skills and reading behavior to be examined across languages and development.

Guided by leading theories of bilingual language processing, this research explores how differences in linguistic experience influence the efficiency of word processing during reading. Understanding how phonological processing supports reading across languages has important theoretical implications for bilingual language acquisition and reading development.

More broadly, these findings can inform educational practices by identifying cognitive/linguistic skills that support efficient reading in increasingly multilingual learning environments.