Graduate Spotlight

Rachel (Poulin) Dorsey is a sixth year PhD student in French linguistics. Her research focuses on the psycholinguistic factors of bilingualism and how a bilingual's diverse daily experiences help shape both their cognitive control (CC) and language processing abilities. In her dissertation, Rachel investigates how code-switching practices, first and second language proficiencies, age of immersion, and a bilingual's relative language dominance impacts both latency and accuracy measurements in the Stroop paradigm in an effort to understand why some bilinguals outperform others on measures of CC. Her other research interests focus on bilingual language interference at the morpho-syntactic level and the interplay of both languages in the bilingual mind. In addition to the contact of languages within the speaker's mind, Rachel is also interested in more macro language contact situations in North American varieties of French, including the implementation of English discourse markers in Acadian French, Anglicism use in Canadian newspapers, as well as lexical and syntactic French substratum effects in Anglophone regions of Canada. 

Rachel is a PhD Pathways Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year. She is working as an instructional design intern for Six Red Marbles.