معرفی
Dr. Elizabeth Johnson serves as Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), holding the Canada Research Chair in Spoken Language Acquisition. She is cross-appointed to the Graduate Department of Linguistics and directs the University of Toronto's Tri-Campus Graduate Program in Psychology, leading interdisciplinary research on language acquisition through the Child Language and Speech Studies (CLASS) Lab in UTM's Communication, Culture and Technology Building.
Her academic foundation includes a B.A. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester (with a Take Five program in Developmental Biology & Evolution), followed by M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Johns Hopkins University. She completed postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and spent semesters at MIT's Speech Group during her doctoral studies.
Dr. Johnson's research examines how perceptual, cognitive, and social mechanisms enable children's rapid language mastery, with emphasis on speech perception, multilingual development, accent processing, and infant speech segmentation. Her work bridges developmental psychology, linguistics, and speech sciences to investigate topics including audio-visual speech perception, word-learning heuristics, prosody acquisition, and voice recognition—all contextualized within UTM's linguistically diverse community.
Analysis of her recent publications reveals intensifying focus on real-world applications of language acquisition research, particularly voice assistant technology for children, pandemic impacts on language development, and sociolinguistic factors in educational settings. Her work increasingly explores accent variation effects across development and the cognitive mechanisms underlying talker recognition.
Dr. Johnson's scientific recognition includes:
- Canada Research Chair in Spoken Language Acquisition
She actively mentors graduate researchers:
- PhD Students: Emily Shroads (June and David Scott Fellowship recipient)
- Recent PhD Graduates: Priscilla Fung (SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow), Madeleine Yu
- Undergraduate Support: NSERC USRA (Christopher Khalaf), SSHRC UTEA (Gabriella Di Maio, Alexandra Maracz)
- Research Funding: SSHRC Insight Grants, NSERC Discovery Grants
The CLASS Lab functions as an interdisciplinary hub collaborating with UTM's Developmental Science Cluster, Centre for Biological Communication Systems, and Infant and Child Studies Centre. Its community-engaged research leverages linguistic diversity in the Greater Toronto Area to translate foundational science into practical applications for child development and educational technology.
