MELD Programs & The MELD Bilingualism Lab

Associate Director of the ARiEAL Research Centre and Director of MELD programs and the Bilingualism Lab, Dr. Anna Moro

The McMaster English Language Development (MELD) Programs and the MELD Bilingualism Lab are both directed by Dr. Anna Moro. MELD programs are intended for international students whose primary language is not English, but wish to improve their English proficiency to succeed in an English-speaking higher education environment. Starting in 2018, MELD Programs have expanded the services from the MELD Diploma to also include McMaster English Readiness for Graduate Excellence (MERGE) and McMaster Office for the Development of English Language Learners (MODEL) to offer an even more comprehensive range of services to both undergraduate and graduate international students. The Bilingualism Lab investigates the underlying linguistic mechanisms of bilingual phenomena and focuses on second language acquisition. In 2018, the lab welcomes a new doctoral student, Rudaina Hamed (co-supervised by Drs. Anna Moro and Victor Kuperman). While MELD Programs are not a research laboratory per se, interesting research on foreign language acquisition is being conducted on a regular basis with the support and guidance of the Bilingualism Lab. In March and April 2018, the MELD research team continued the eye-tracking experiment and reading tests (including phonological processing, expressive and receptive vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension) with their 2017-2018 student cohort (who started in September 2017). The results were being compared to the data collected in the year prior to examine the changes in performance. Presentations based on the research findings were presented in the United States and Canada. The same testing procedure was implemented again with the 2018-2019 student cohort of 360. The continuity of these research activities aims to bring steady improvement to the MELD programs.

Neurotechnology & Neuroplasticity Lab

Director of the Neurotechnology and Neuroplasticity Lab, Dr. Sue Becker.

The Neurotechnology and Neuroplasticity Lab is directed by Dr. Sue Becker whose research focuses on the neural bases of learning and memory. The lab employs a variety of methodologies including computational modelling, behavioural and neuroimaging studies to investigate questions such as how the hippocampus codes episodic and spatial memories, the role of neurogenesis in memory and mood regulation, how stress, binge drinking, exercise and neurofeedback affect hippocampal memory functions and intrinsic brain networks, and how the auditory cortex re-organizes after hearing loss. Applications of this research include the development of novel algorithms for EEG-based neurofeedback and brain-computer-interfaces. In 2018, Lauren Smail and Sara Jamil from the lab successfully completed their master’s degree, and Craig Hutton as well as Laura Keating completed their doctoral degree. Dr. Becker also received infrastructure operating fund from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation for her research on hearing technology. Members of Dr. Becker’s lab disseminated their research findings at various local and national conferences including the 15th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision, and published their findings on automated neurofeedback training in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

Teaching and Learning Lab

Dr. Catherine Anderson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages, directs the Teaching and Learning Lab. The lab’s research, all of which is conducted in collaboration with undergraduate student partners, focuses on students’ experiences in a variety of undergraduate learning contexts. In 2018, the undergraduate student partners continued their project: Dana Tucci completed another round of data collection for the Team-Based Learning in the Active Learning Classroom project; Paige McKenny and Dr. Anderson submitted a paper on working in partnership to conduct a program review to International Journal of Students as Partners. Also in 2018, with support from McMaster University and a $15,000 grant from eCampusOntario’s Open Textbook initiative, Dr. Anderson published an open-access Linguistics textbook entitled Essentials of Linguistics to address the affordability and accessibility of course materials. In the context of the calls to action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report in 2015, Dr. Anderson also included a chapter on how linguistics can help Indigenous communities preserve their languages in Canada.

Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Director of the Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Dr. Marc Joanisse.

The Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab is directed by Dr. Marc Joanisse, and is housed in The University of Western Ontario’s Brain and Mind Institute. Dr. Joanisse’s Lab examines the cognitive and neural foundations of language and reading across the lifespan. This includes studying reading and language disorders in children, as well as language learning and processing in adults. A wide variety of experimental techniques including eye-tracking and event-related potentials measured with EEG are used, along with resting-state and task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging. In 2018, the Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience lab received funding from Canada Foundation for Innovation for its infrastructure development. While the lab continued its multi-year project in examining the influence of reading remediation on brain markers of reading impairment in school-aged children, Dr. Marc Joanisse also received the Canada First Research Excellence Fund to study the neurocognitive, genetic and environmental risk factors of learning disorders in children. In addition to this, Dr. Joanisse’s continued collaboration with another ARiEAL member, Dr. Lisa Archibald, resulted in three journal article publications and two presentations in 2018.

The Syntax Lab

Director of the Syntax Lab, Dr. Ivona Kučerová.

The Syntax Lab is directed by Dr. Ivona Kučerová and it investigates syntactic structures, including combinatorial properties of natural languages from the general-cognition perspective. Both traditional fieldwork and experimental methods are used to collect data from cross-linguistically diverse languages, including Indigenous languages of Canada, in order to identify and model universal and language-specific structural properties human languages have. The primary focus of the lab is on modelling features at the syntax-semantics interface. In 2018, Dr. Kučerová’s student, Cassandra Chapman, successfully completed her doctorate degree, and Dr. Nicholas Welch completed his postdoctoral fellowship. The groundwork started in 2017 on creating a formal research collaboration with the communities of the Six Nations of the Grand River led to a successful grant application. Dr. Kučerová received an Indigenous Research and Reconciliation Connection Grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to study the rigor of Indigenous pedagogy regarding language revitalization and the possible pathways for collaboration with university-based research. The lab continued its participation in several experimental projects on sentential processing with international partners in the United States of America, the United Arab Emirates, and the Czech Republic. Dr. Kučerová was invited to speak at various seminars and conferences across the world, including serving as the keynote speaker at the Stanford University Formal Approaches to Slavic Languages Conference.

The Reading Lab

Director of the Reading Lab, Dr. Victor Kuperman.

The Reading Lab is directed by Dr. Victor Kuperman and it targets a range of areas in psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics. More specifically, the Reading Lab focuses on the visuo-oculomotor and cognitive predictors of reading, the processing of printed morphologically complex words, and the effects of emotion on language production and comprehension. Eye-tracking is the key research paradigm at the Reading Lab. In 2018, the Reading Lab welcomed one new master’s student, Sean McCarron. Members of the Reading Lab had a successful year presenting their work at various international conferences including the 11th International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, and the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Lab members also published their work in a number of prestigious journals including: Scientific Reports, Behavior Research Methods and PLoS ONE. In particular, the “Twitter” Study which examines differences in the language used in nearly 40-million tweets in the United States of America and Canada went viral and led to a range of media coverage. Through Dr. Kuperman’s collaboration with “Words in the World (WoW)”, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnered Research Training Initiative, the Reading Lab continued to host many researchers from around the world to conduct workshops and/or present at the lecture series at ARiEAL.

Imaging Research Centre

Director of the Imaging Research Centre, Dr. Michael Noseworthy.

Dr. Michael Noseworthy is the director of the Medical Imaging Physics and Engineering at the Imaging Research Centre at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, which provides the research community with access to imaging technology (including the GE Healthcare 3T Discovery MR7503T MRI scanner, and a Siemens Biograph-16 PET/CT scanner). In 2018, two of Dr. Noseworthy’s students, Diana Harasym and Nicholas Simard (co-supervised by Drs. Michael Noseworthy & Aimee Nelson), successfully completed their master’s degree, and Alejandro Santos-Diaz and Evan McNabb completed their doctoral degree. Dr. Noseworthy’s team has built MRI hardware and written new pulse sequences for rapidly assessing the high energy phosphates and intra/extracellular sodium levels within the brain, as well as continuing to develop novel technology for non-proton based MRI scanning. Recently his group has been developing machine learning approaches to better understand medical images that depict brain diseases and various cancers. Dr. Noseworthy was invited by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Congreso Médica Campestre in Mexico on different occasions to present the clinical applications of advanced MRI methods. Members of his team also participated in a number of conferences during 2018 including one for the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in France. Their work was also published in several highly regarded journals including Magnetic Resonance Imaging, as well as Physics in Medicine and Biology.

The Phonetics Lab

Director of the Phonetics Lab, Dr. Daniel Pape.

The Phonetics Lab is directed by Dr. Daniel Pape, and it focuses on experimental phonetics, the link between speech production and speech perception, and the relationship between phonetics and neurolinguistics. More specifically, the research at the Phonetics Lab examines the use and interplay of acoustic cues (i.e., cue-weighting) for (1) speech production and perception and (2) articulatory and biomechanical constraints in speech perception. 2018 marked many great milestones in the Phonetics Lab. Dr. Pape officially accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at McMaster University. As San-Hei Kenny Luk (co-supervised by Drs. Daniel Pape and Elisabet Service) successfully completed his master’s degree, the lab welcomed its first PhD student, Sara Pearsell, in 2018. Dr. Pape also received the Early Researcher Discovery Grant from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to maintain and enhance the lab’s research facility to further investigate subphonemic cue-weighting and prosodic categories as they pertain to speech production and speech perception. The study on the articulatory settings and their relationship to the produced speech sounds for Polish retroflexes, and the study on the cue-weighting of Canadian English stops both started in 2017 and are steadily underway in 2018. A new experimental research stream examining the importance and interplay of several acoustic cues on the production and perception of lexical stress and focus started in 2018.

The Reilly Lab

Director of the Reilly Lab, Dr. Jim Reilly.

The Turkstra Lab

Director of the Turkstra Lab, Dr. Lyn Turkstra

Dr. Lyn Turkstra’s research examines links between cognitive function and social communication in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), with the goal of improving clinical practice and long-term patient outcomes. The Turkstra lab had a productive 2018. In the spring, undergraduate students Noel Kim, Emily MacIntyre, and Jonathan Jin were awarded third place for their poster on everyday adolescent language, at the Hamilton Health Sciences 25th Annual Conference on Neurobehavioural Rehabilitation in Acquired Brain Injury. In the summer, the lab launched a collaborative study with Drs. Sheila Sprague and Mohit Bhandari in the McMaster Orthopaedic Surgery Department, to determine the prevalence of TBI and intimate partner violence among female patients. In the fall, the lab welcomed a new Neuroscience master’s student, Reihaneh Ahmadi. Dr. Turkstra and her colleagues also successfully received funding from the US Department of Defense to develop a brief cognitive rehabilitation intervention for Service Members and Veterans with mild TBI.

The Language and Working Memory Lab

Director of the Language and Working Memory Lab, Dr. Lisa Archibald

The Language and Working Memory Lab is directed by Dr. Lisa Archibald, and is part of the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at The University of Western Ontario. The Language and Working Memory Lab focuses on investigating how language and memory processes interact in both children learning at a typical rate and those with learning disabilities. In 2018, Dr. Archibald was successful in receiving a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant to fund the development of a new research model targeting language and literacy learning in primary school children. Using a practice-based research approach, Dr. Archibald and her students have established partnerships with 3 area school boards to address questions arising from practice by educational speech-language pathologists promoting language and literacy. In addition to this, Dr. Archibald and her colleague received a SSHRC Insight Grant for their research regarding early interventions in writing. The initial study in this project has examined oral narrative language intervention for promoting written language outcomes in grade 1 students. A number of Dr. Archibald’s students successfully completed their degree during 2018 including Nicolette Noonan, Laura Pauls, Areej Balilah, and Renata Lohemann. Students working under the supervision of Dr. Archibald at the Language and Working Memory Lab also contributed to a number of articles published in well-regarded journals including the Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology as well as Audiology and Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Research conducted at the Language and Working Memory Lab was presented at various conferences including the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders. 2018 also saw the continued collaboration between Dr. Archibald and her fellow ARiEAL member, Dr. Marc Joanisse, which resulted in three journal article publications and two conference presentations.

The MTBI Research Program

Director of The mTBI Research Program, Professor Carol DeMatteo.

As a clinician scientist, Professor Carol DeMatteo has led many research studies in the area of childhood neurotrauma, specifically all severities of acquired brain injury including concussion. Professor DeMatteo is based at CanChild Centre for Childhood Disability Research and the School of Rehabilitation Science, and in 2018, she continued collaboration with researchers across Canada to study the diagnosis and treatment of children presenting with concussions in pediatric emergency departments. Professor DeMatteo also co-authored several articles about this research, some of which are published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine and the Journal of Neurotrauma. During 2018, Professor DeMatteo and the team (including ARiEAL members, Drs. John Connolly and Michael Noseworthy, and ARiEAL manager, Ms. Chia-Yu Lin) were completing the data analyses for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded Back to Play study on evaluating the effectiveness of Return to Activity (RTA) and Return to School (RTS) Guidelines in the pediatric population. While manuscript preparation is still underway, Professor DeMatteo presented the interim results, both nationally and internationally, at the Third International Conference on Paediatric Acquired Brain Injury, as well as the Annual Meeting of Pediatric Academic Societies. She was also invited to share the Canadian lessons learned on managing pediatric concussion in Liverpool, UK. Professor DeMatteo with the Brain Smart Hamilton Team received funding from the Hamilton Community Foundation to attempt to learn about the current practices regarding concussion protocols in organized youth sports in Hamilton. Final analyses and dissemination are currently underway. Professor DeMatteo, alongside the Concussion Research Team with internal funding from CanChild, updated and revised the CanChild Pediatric RTA and RTS concussion management guidelines, in accordance to the 2017 Berlin Consensus Statement on Concussion, a recently completed systematic review on the effects of guidelines on RTA and RTS, and the results from the Back to Play study.

The Performance Science Lab

Director of the Performance Science Lab, Dr. Ranil Sonnadara.

The Performance Science Lab is directed by Dr. Ranil Sonnadara, and it studies the way that people learn new skills. The lab is particularly interested in how information flow across the motor and perceptual systems changes with practice, and how feedback and assessment can be effectively implemented to support skill acquisition. The lab also studies ways to optimize performance in high-stakes environments, and how performance can be measured in meaningful ways. In 2018, The Performance Science Lab continued to explore the role of competence committees in competency-based medical education, how we learn through observation, the transition from clerkship to residency, and how we can use machine learning as a teaching aide in healthcare. Research was presented at a number of distinguished conferences including the World Summit on Competency-Based Medical Education, the International Conference of Residency Education and the 15th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision. In 2018, Dr. Sonnadara and his team successfully received six research grants, published nine research articles/book chapters, and shared their work through 23 presentations across the globe. Several of Dr. Sonnadara’s students successfully completed their master’s degree in 2018 including: Lauren Smail, Sara Jamil, Dr. Laura Vanderbeek, and Dr. Christine Orr.

MELD Programs & The MELD Bilingualism Lab

The McMaster English Language Development (MELD) Programs and the MELD Bilingualism Lab are both directed by Dr. Anna Moro. MELD programs are intended for international students whose primary language is not English, but wish to improve their English proficiency to succeed in an English-speaking higher education environment. Starting in 2018, MELD Programs have expanded the services from the MELD Diploma to also include McMaster English Readiness for Graduate Excellence (MERGE) and McMaster Office for the Development of English Language Learners (MODEL) to offer an even more comprehensive range of services to both undergraduate and graduate international students. The Bilingualism Lab investigates the underlying linguistic mechanisms of bilingual phenomena and focuses on second language acquisition. In 2018, the lab welcomes a new doctoral student, Rudaina Hamed (co-supervised by Drs. Anna Moro and Victor Kuperman). While MELD Programs are not a research laboratory per se, interesting research on foreign language acquisition is being conducted on a regular basis with the support and guidance of the Bilingualism Lab. In March and April 2018, the MELD research team continued the eye-tracking experiment and reading tests (including phonological processing, expressive and receptive vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension) with their 2017-2018 student cohort (who started in September 2017). The results were being compared to the data collected in the year prior to examine the changes in performance. Presentations based on the research findings were presented in the United States and Canada. The same testing procedure was implemented again with the 2018-2019 student cohort of 360. The continuity of these research activities aims to bring steady improvement to the MELD programs.

Neurotechnology & Neuroplasticity Lab

The Neurotechnology and Neuroplasticity Lab is directed by Dr. Sue Becker whose research focuses on the neural bases of learning and memory. The Neurotechnology and Neuroplasticity Lab employs a variety of methodologies including computational modelling, behavioural and neuroimaging studies to investigate questions such as how the hippocampus codes episodic and spatial memories, the role of neurogenesis in memory and mood regulation, how stress, binge drinking, exercise and neurofeedback affect hippocampal memory functions and intrinsic brain networks, and how the auditory cortex re-organizes after hearing loss. Applications of this research include the development of novel algorithms for EEG-based neurofeedback and brain-computer-interfaces. In 2018, two students from the Neurotechnology and Neuroplasticity Lab, Lauren Smail and Sara Jamil, successfully completed their master’s degree, and Craig Hutton as well as Laura Keating completed their doctoral degree. Dr. Becker also received infrastructure operating fund from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation for her research on hearing technology. Members of Dr. Becker’s lab disseminated their research findings at various local and national conferences including the 15th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision, and published their findings on automated neurofeedback training in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

Teaching and Learning Lab

Dr. Catherine Anderson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages, directs the Teaching and Learning Lab. The lab’s research, all of which is conducted in collaboration with undergraduate student partners, focuses on students’ experiences in a variety of undergraduate learning contexts. In 2018, the undergraduate student partners continued their project: Dana Tucci completed another round of data collection for the Team-Based Learning in the Active Learning Classroom project; Paige McKenny and Dr. Anderson submitted a paper on working in partnership to conduct a program review to International Journal of Students as Partners. Also in 2018, with support from McMaster University and a $15,000 grant from eCampusOntario’s Open Textbook initiative, Dr. Anderson published an open-access Linguistics textbook entitled Essentials of Linguistics to address the affordability and accessibility of course materials. In the context of the calls to action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report in 2015, Dr. Anderson also included a chapter on how linguistics can help Indigenous communities preserve their languages in Canada.

Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

The Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab is directed by Dr. Marc Joanisse, and is housed in The University of Western Ontario’s Brain and Mind Institute. Dr. Joanisse’s Lab examines the cognitive and neural foundations of language and reading across the lifespan. This includes studying reading and language disorders in children, as well as language learning and processing in adults. A wide variety of experimental techniques including eye-tracking and event-related potentials measured with EEG are used, along with resting-state and task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging. In 2018, the Language, Reading and Cognitive Neuroscience lab received funding from Canada Foundation for Innovation for its infrastructure development. While the lab continued its multi-year project in examining the influence of reading remediation on brain markers of reading impairment in school-aged children, Dr. Marc Joanisse also received the Canada First Research Excellence Fund to study the neurocognitive, genetic and environmental risk factors of learning disorders in children. In addition to this, Dr. Joanisse’s continued collaboration with another ARiEAL member, Dr. Lisa Archibald, resulted in three journal article publications and two presentations in 2018.

The Syntax Lab

The Syntax Lab is directed by Dr. Ivona Kučerová and it investigates syntactic structures, including combinatorial properties of natural languages from the general-cognition perspective. Both traditional fieldwork and experimental methods are used to collect data from cross-linguistically diverse languages, including Indigenous languages of Canada, in order to identify and model universal and language-specific structural properties human languages have. The primary focus of the work currently done in the lab is on modelling features at the syntax-semantics interface. In 2018, one of Dr. Kučerová’s students, Cassandra Chapman, successfully completed her doctorate degree, and Dr. Nicholas Welch also completed his postdoctoral fellowship. The groundwork started in 2017 on creating a formal research collaboration with the communities of the Six Nations of the Grand River led to a successful grant application. Dr. Kučerová received an Indigenous Research and Reconciliation Connection Grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to study the rigor of Indigenous pedagogy regarding language revitalization and the possible pathways for collaboration with university-based research. The lab continued its participation in several experimental projects on sentential processing with international partners in the United States of America, the United Arab Emirates, and the Czech Republic. Dr. Kučerová was invited to speak at various seminars and conferences across the world, including serving as the keynote speaker at the Stanford University Formal Approaches to Slavic Languages Conference.

The Reading Lab

The Reading Lab is directed by Dr. Victor Kuperman and it targets a range of areas in psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics. More specifically, the Reading Lab focuses on the visuo-oculomotor and cognitive predictors of reading, the processing of printed morphologically complex words, and the effects of emotion on language production and comprehension. Eye-tracking is the key research paradigm at the Reading Lab. In 2018, the Reading Lab welcomed one new master’s student, Sean McCarron. Members of the Reading Lab had a successful year presenting their work at various international conferences including the 11th International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, and the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Lab members also published their work in a number of prestigious journals including: Scientific Reports, Behavior Research Methods and PLoS ONE. In particular, the “Twitter” Study which examines differences in the language used in nearly 40-million tweets in the United States of America and Canada went viral and led to a range of media coverage. Through Dr. Kuperman’s collaboration with “Words in the World (WoW)”, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnered Research Training Initiative, the Reading Lab continued to host many researchers from around the world to conduct workshops and/or present at the lecture series at ARiEAL.

Imaging Research Centre

Dr. Michael Noseworthy is the director of the Medical Imaging Physics and Engineering at the Imaging Research Centre at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, which provides the research community with access to imaging technology (including the GE Healthcare 3T Discovery MR7503T MRI scanner, and a Siemens Biograph-16 PET/CT scanner). In 2018, two of Dr. Noseworthy’s students, Diana Harasym and Nicholas Simard (co-supervised by Drs. Michael Noseworthy & Aimee Nelson), successfully completed their master’s degree, and Alejandro Santos-Diaz and Evan McNabb completed their doctoral degree. Dr. Noseworthy’s team has built MRI hardware and written new pulse sequences for rapidly assessing the high energy phosphates and intra/extracellular sodium levels within the brain, as well as continuing to develop novel technology for non-proton based MRI scanning. Recently his group has been developing machine learning approaches to better understand medical images that depict brain diseases and various cancers. Dr. Noseworthy was invited by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Congreso Médica Campestre in Mexico on different occasions to present the clinical applications of advanced MRI methods. Members of his team also participated in a number of conferences during 2018 including one for the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in France. Their work was also published in several highly regarded journals including Magnetic Resonance Imaging, as well as Physics in Medicine and Biology.

The Phonetics Lab

The Phonetics Lab is directed by Dr. Daniel Pape, and it focuses on experimental phonetics, the link between speech production and speech perception, and the relationship between phonetics and neurolinguistics. More specifically, the research at the Phonetics Lab examines the use and interplay of acoustic cues (i.e., cue-weighting) for (1) speech production and perception and (2) articulatory and biomechanical constraints in speech perception. 2018 marked many great milestones in the Phonetics Lab. Dr. Pape officially accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at McMaster University. As San-Hei Kenny Luk (co-supervised by Drs. Daniel Pape and Elisabet Service) successfully completed his master’s degree, the lab welcomed its first PhD student, Sara Pearsell, in 2018. Dr. Pape also received the Early Researcher Discovery Grant from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to maintain and enhance the lab’s research facility to further investigate subphonemic cue-weighting and prosodic categories as they pertain to speech production and speech perception. The study on the articulatory settings and their relationship to the produced speech sounds for Polish retroflexes, and the study on the cue-weighting of Canadian English stops both started in 2017 and are steadily underway in 2018. A new experimental research stream examining the importance and interplay of several acoustic cues on the production and perception of lexical stress and focus started in 2018.

The Reilly Lab

Dr. Jim Reilly works at the interface of machine learning and signal processing applied to health-related problems, particularly in neuroscience and psychiatry. Specific projects in this area include the development of improved machine learning algorithms, diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, prognosis for coma outcome, and the assessment of infant motor movement relating to neurological deficit. In 2018, one of the students (Phil Chrapka) from the Reilly Lab successfully completed their doctoral degree. The Reilly Lab also continues the collaboration with other ARiEAL members, including Dr. Connolly’s Language, Memory and Brain Lab, on the coma project. Together, they were awarded with a Collaborative Health Research Projects grant by Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to develop a point of care system for automated coma prognosis. Dr. Reilly takes the lead on advising the machine learning aspect of this funded project. Research conducted at the Reilly Lab were disseminated in manuscripts published in reputable journals including: IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.

The Turkstra Lab

Dr. Lyn Turkstra’s research examines links between cognitive function and social communication in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), with the goal of improving clinical practice and long-term patient outcomes. The Turkstra lab had a productive 2018. In the spring, undergraduate students Noel Kim, Emily MacIntyre, and Jonathan Jin were awarded third place for their poster on everyday adolescent language, at the Hamilton Health Sciences 25th Annual Conference on Neurobehavioural Rehabilitation in Acquired Brain Injury. In the summer, the lab launched a collaborative study with Drs. Sheila Sprague and Mohit Bhandari in the McMaster Orthopaedic Surgery Department, to determine the prevalence of TBI and intimate partner violence among female patients. In the fall, the lab welcomed a new Neuroscience master’s student, Reihaneh Ahmadi. Dr. Turkstra and her colleagues also successfully received funding from the US Department of Defense to develop a brief cognitive rehabilitation intervention for Service Members and Veterans with mild TBI.

The Language and Working Memory Lab

The Language and Working Memory Lab is directed by Dr. Lisa Archibald, and is part of the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at The University of Western Ontario. The Language and Working Memory Lab focuses on investigating how language and memory processes interact in both children learning at a typical rate and those with learning disabilities. In 2018, Dr. Archibald was successful in receiving a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant to fund the development of a new research model targeting language and literacy learning in primary school children. Using a practice-based research approach, Dr. Archibald and her students have established partnerships with 3 area school boards to address questions arising from practice by educational speech-language pathologists promoting language and literacy. In addition to this, Dr. Archibald and her colleague received a SSHRC Insight Grant for their research regarding early interventions in writing. The initial study in this project has examined oral narrative language intervention for promoting written language outcomes in grade 1 students. A number of Dr. Archibald’s students successfully completed their degree during 2018 including Nicolette Noonan, Laura Pauls, Areej Balilah, and Renata Lohemann. Students working under the supervision of Dr. Archibald at the Language and Working Memory Lab also contributed to a number of articles published in well-regarded journals including the Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology as well as Audiology and Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Research conducted at the Language and Working Memory Lab was presented at various conferences including the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders. 2018 also saw the continued collaboration between Dr. Archibald and her fellow ARiEAL member, Dr. Marc Joanisse, which resulted in three journal article publications and two conference presentations.

The MTBI Research Program

As a clinician scientist, Professor Carol DeMatteo has led many research studies in the area of childhood neurotrauma, specifically all severities of acquired brain injury including concussion. Professor DeMatteo is based at CanChild Centre for Childhood Disability Research and the School of Rehabilitation Science, and in 2018, she continued collaboration with researchers across Canada to study the diagnosis and treatment of children presenting with concussions in pediatric emergency departments. Professor DeMatteo also co-authored several articles about this research, some of which are published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine and the Journal of Neurotrauma. During 2018, Professor DeMatteo and the team (including ARiEAL members, Drs. John Connolly and Michael Noseworthy, and ARiEAL manager, Ms. Chia-Yu Lin) were completing the data analyses for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded Back to Play study on evaluating the effectiveness of Return to Activity (RTA) and Return to School (RTS) Guidelines in the pediatric population. While manuscript preparation is still underway, Professor DeMatteo presented the interim results, both nationally and internationally, at the Third International Conference on Paediatric Acquired Brain Injury, as well as the Annual Meeting of Pediatric Academic Societies. She was also invited to share the Canadian lessons learned on managing pediatric concussion in Liverpool, UK. Professor DeMatteo with the Brain Smart Hamilton Team received funding from the Hamilton Community Foundation to attempt to learn about the current practices regarding concussion protocols in organized youth sports in Hamilton. Final analyses and dissemination are currently underway. Professor DeMatteo, alongside the Concussion Research Team with internal funding from CanChild, updated and revised the CanChild Pediatric RTA and RTS concussion management guidelines, in accordance to the 2017 Berlin Consensus Statement on Concussion, a recently completed systematic review on the effects of guidelines on RTA and RTS, and the results from the Back to Play study.

The Performance Science Lab

The Performance Science Lab is directed by Dr. Ranil Sonnadara, and it studies the way that people learn new skills. The lab is particularly interested in how information flow across the motor and perceptual systems changes with practice, and how feedback and assessment can be effectively implemented to support skill acquisition. The lab also studies ways to optimize performance in high-stakes environments, and how performance can be measured in meaningful ways. In 2018, The Performance Science Lab continued to explore the role of competence committees in competency-based medical education, how we learn through observation, the transition from clerkship to residency, and how we can use machine learning as a teaching aide in healthcare. Research was presented at a number of distinguished conferences including the World Summit on Competency-Based Medical Education, the International Conference of Residency Education and the 15th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision. In 2018, Dr. Sonnadara and his team successfully received six research grants, published nine research articles/book chapters, and shared their work through 23 presentations across the globe. Several of Dr. Sonnadara’s students successfully completed their master’s degree in 2018 including: Lauren Smail, Sara Jamil, Dr. Laura Vanderbeek, and Dr. Christine Orr.