Johanne Paradis

Johanne Paradis is Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Alberta. Her research is concerned with bilingualism in children with typical development and in children with developmental disorders, in particular children learning English-as-a-second language from immigrant and refugee families.

The project

Title: Bilingualism in Children with Typical and Atypical Development

"This lecture series will draw primarily on topics, methods and findings from my 25+ years of research with bilingual children and youth. The lecture series will focus on typical and atypical bilingual development in the late-preschool and school-age years, the cognitive and experiential factors that shape this development, and bilingual children’s outcomes as they reach adolescence. Theoretical and controversial questions will be interwoven into the lectures, for example: (1) What is the nature of the interactions between the two languages of bilinguals? (2) Can bilinguals keep pace - or catch up – with their monolingual peers in development? (3) When is it appropriate to compare bilinguals with monolinguals? (4) Do children with language and communication disorders have the capacity to learn two languages? The applied relevance of research findings for educational and clinical practice, as well as advice to parents, will also be interwoven into the lectures. Methods that underlie this research are mainly observational, quasi-experimental and corpus-based, and take place in children’s homes and schools, involving the participation of parents, teachers and community partners. A specific focus on questionnaires in research with bilingual children will be included."

Hosting institution: Université Paris Cité - CNRS

Selective Bibliography

• Paradis, J., Genesee, F., & Crago, M. (2021). Dual language development and disorders: A handbook on bilingualism and second language learning (3nd Edition). Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
• Paradis, J. (2023). Sources of individual differences in the dual language development of heritage bilinguals. Keynote article. Journal of Child Language. 50, 793-817.
• Paradis, J., Soto-Corominas, A., Vitroulis, I., Al Janaideh, R., Chen, X., Gottardo, A., Jenkins, J., & Georgiades, K. (2022).  The role of socioemotional wellbeing difficulties and adversity in the L2 acquisition of first-generation refugee children.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 25, 921-933.
• Govindarajan, K., & Paradis, J. (2022). Narrative macrostructure and microstructure profiles of bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder: Differentiation from bilingual children with developmental language disorder and typical development. Applied Psycholinguistics, 43, 1359-1390.
• Paradis, J., Sorenson Duncan, T., Thomlinson, S., & Rusk, B. (2022). Does the use of complex sentences differentiate between bilinguals with and without DLD? Evidence from conversation and narrative tasks. Frontiers in Education, p 1-18. 6:804088.