Overview
Speaker: Stephanie Durrleman
Date: May 22, 2026
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET
Language: English
Format: In-person at the De Grandpré Communications Centre, The Neuro
Audience: CanNRT and TACC Members*
*Not yet a member? Join CanNRT or TACC for free to access this and other events and opportunities.
Despite the widespread prevalence of multilingualism worldwide, families of autistic children are still often advised to restrict language exposure. Drawing on recent cross-sectional and longitudinal research conducted at the Autism, Bilingualism, Cognitive and Communicative Development (ABCCD) Lab at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, this talk examines how bilingual experience relates to cognition in autism. Using both experimental and parent-report measures, I will show that dual language exposure is not detrimental and may, in some cases, be associated with stronger performance in areas such as Theory of Mind and executive functions, with important implications for multilingual families of autistic children.
Speaker
After earning her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Geneva, Stephanie Durrleman collaborated with research teams in psycholinguistics at the same university, as well as in cognitive science at the University of Lyon, language science at the University of Tours, and science and medicine at the University of Fribourg. Her research spans diverse topics, including syntactic cartography, syntactic locality, language acquisition, bilingualism, the grammar-cognition interface, and language disorders. She investigates these areas across a wide range of linguistic contexts (e.g., Romance, Germanic, Creole, Kwa, Sino-Tibetan). By integrating linguistic theory with empirical methods (experimental, corpus-based, etc.), her work often leads to practical applications, such as refining language policies and developing therapeutic interventions for children with atypical language development.
Dr. Durrleman is currently a professor at the Department of Science and Medicine at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland’s only bilingual university, where she leads a research group of PhD and postdoctoral collaborators exploring bilingualism in both typical and atypical development.
Learn more about her work
The ABCCD Lab led by Dr. Durrleman has created outreach videos in multiple languages. Check them out in English, French, German, and/or, Swiss German.
Questions?
Contact: Ellie-Anna Minogianis
Training Program Manager, CanNRT
cannrt@mcgill.ca
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