Olessia Jouravlev

Olessia Jouravlev is a principal investigator of Language and Social Cognition Lab in the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. In our lab, we relate human linguistic and social behavior to brain responses in order to understand neurocognitive mechanisms of language/communication in neurotypical individuals and individuals with language/communication disorders. There are three complimentary research directions that we pursue.

The first one relates to multilingualism. We probe into questions of language representations in minds and brains of multilinguals. We examine how multilingualism impacts linguistic and non-linguistic behavior. We survey populations with exceptional linguistic talents like polyglots and individuals experiencing difficulty in learning foreign languages.

The second line of research that we pursue is social communication. Communication seems effortless for most of us, yet it requires understanding of social and cultural rules, emotional competence, ability to infer mental states of others, and a capacity to modify your speech depending on context. This is known as pragmatic reasoning. We examine computations that we perform and representations that we build during pragmatic reasoning. We investigate individual differences in pragmatic reasoning abilities. Of special interest to us are patient populations, showing impaired abilities in social communication, including individuals with autism and psychopathic disorders.

The final line of research that we work on is visual word recognition/reading/writing. Within this research direction, we explore neurocognitive mechanisms of these linguistic skills and examine performance of hyperlexic individuals, who acquired reading/writing skills precociously early, and of dyslexic individuals, who have difficulty in reading and writing.

Olessia completed a postdoctoral appointment at McGovern Institute of Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.