Debra Titone is a cognitive psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is currently a Professor of Psychology and a chair holder of Canada Research in Language & Multilingualism at McGill University.[1][2] Titone is a founding member and officer of the professional society, Women in Cognitive Science.[3] She and her colleagues have written about gender disparities in opportunities, along with the advancement of women the field of cognitive science, with specific reference to Canada.[4]
Titone is a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS)[5] and, in 2019, she received their Richard C. Tees Distinguished Leadership Award.[6] Previous honors included the SWAP Feminist Mentoring Award from the Canadian Psychological Association, awarded to Titone in 2017.[7]
Biography
Titone received her B.A., with honors in Psychology from New York University.[8] She subsequently obtained her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the Binghamton University in 1995, where she was mentored by Cynthia Connine.[9] With Connine, she conducted research on idiomatic expressions, focusing specifically on how individual word components influence idiom interpretation.[10][11]
Titone's research program at McGill explores how people read, write, listen, and speak languages, possible advantages of bilingualism, and how the processing of multiple languages is different from monolingualism.[17] Her work has aimed to characterize the diversity of language experiences that people have and how this diversity reflects the human brain's capacity for language.[20] Titone's research on bilingualism, executive control, and aging suggests that bilinguals may experience multiple advantages in cognitive capacity as compared to monolinguals, which may stem from enhanced neurocognitive plasticity.[21]
Representative work
Baum, S., & Titone, D. (2014). Moving toward a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism, executive control, and aging. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35(5), 857–894.
Gullifer, J. W., & Titone, D. (2020). Characterizing the social diversity of bilingualism using language entropy. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 94(1), 1-18.
Pivneva, I., Mercier, J., & Titone, D. (2014). Executive control modulates cross-language lexical activation during L2 reading: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(3), 787–796.
Titone, D. (1998). Hemispheric differences in context sensitivity during lexical ambiguity resolution. Brain and Language, 65(3), 361-394.
Titone, D., Libben, M., Mercier, J., Whitford, V., & Pivneva, I. (2011). Bilingual lexical access during L1 sentence reading: The effects of L2 knowledge, semantic constraint, and L1–L2 intermixing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(6), 1412-1431.
