Researcher Profile
Deanna Friesen
Assistant Professor
Department(s):
Faculty of Education
Publications:
Research Areas
Profile
Deanna Friesen is a member of the Applied Psychology Arc at the Faculty of Education where she studies bilingualism and its impact on language and cognitive processing. Specifically, she investigates how bilingualism as a life experience impacts language use: word recognition, sentence processing, speech perception and text processing. Deanna uses behavioural, eye-tracking, and neural (i.e., EEG) measures in her work.
Recently, Dr Friesen began to investigate how to support reading comprehension success in bilingual readers. To this end, she is investigating what reading strategies are employed by elementary school students in French Immersion when reading in both English and French. She is also investigating the strategies used by English language learners and monolingual readers. The goal is to determine characteristics that differentiate successful bilingual readers from less successful readers in order to support reading development in bilingual students who are struggling.
