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Funded through the  program of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the principal investigator of the project – Le français à la mesure d'un continent : un patrimoine en partage (French Language Across a Continent: A Shared Heritage) – is Professor France Martineau of the University of Ottawa who holds a University Research Chair in Language and Migration in French America and is the director of Le laboratoire Les Polyphonies du français and co-founder of the Laboratoire de français ancien.

The study will include 13 fellow researchers and 59 partners from Canada, the United States, France and Japan working in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, history, geography and computer science.

Right: Raymond Mougeon

Other members of the involved in the project include Hélène Blondeau of the University of Florida, Annette Boudreau and Rodrigue Landry of the Université de Moncton, Yves Frenette of the University of Ottawa, Françoise Gadet of the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (Paris X) and Ruth King of 91��ɫ.

The way French is spoken in places as diverse as Gatineau, Shediac and New Orleans can tell a lot about how Francophone communities evolved in North America. "We are looking at three fields of expansion from France: New France – now known as Quebec��– Louisiana and Acadia," says Mougeon.

"If we just focused on Canada, we would miss some important components of the North American francophonie, mainly Louisiana, probably one of the most interesting colonial settings, because it involved not only colonization from France, but also secondary migration from Acadia – basically the French language continued to live, but in a completely different setting from the original."

According to Mougeon, the project team plans to reach beyond linguistics to include history and sociology. "We believe that you can only understand the evolution of language if you can actually place it in its broader socio-historical setting.”

The study will use innovative approaches, by presenting individuals and their language as a central factor in the changes that society undergoes and by examining the relationship between the cognitive and cultural aspects of language. Relying on extensive documentation, the study will seek to identify the concerns of present-day francophone communities, in majority, minority or multicultural settings.

The research will also help produce a major corpus of French in North America, which will include informal exchanges between individuals in the form of private correspondence or spontaneous conversation. This publicly accessible tool will be useful as a starting point to systematically compare francophone communities.

Mougeon has conducted research on the diversity of spoken French in Ontario, the demo-linguistic vitality of the Franco-Ontarian community, the sociolinguistic history of French in Quebec and France from the colonial period to the present day and the sociolinguistic competence of French-immersion students. He is the author or co-author of several publications and has participated in 36 research projects with funds representing over $5 million in research grants, including those from SSHRC, the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Association of Canadian Studies.

By Marika Kemeny, Glendon communications officer.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The $2.5-million project is led by Francine Martineau of the university's French department, but includes 13 fellow researchers and 59 "partners" from Canada, the United States, France and Japan.

The seven-year plan is to study 400 years of family histories to examine how language has shaped communities and cultures.

"We are looking at three fields of expansion from France that are all basically located across the St. Lawrence, which is New France, Louisiana and Acadia," explained co-investigator of 91��ɫ [Glendon and the ].

"If we just focused on Canada, then we would miss some important components of North American francophonie, mainly Louisiana – and probably one of the most interesting colonial settings as well, because it involved not only colonization from France, but also secondary migration from Acadia – basically the French language continued to live, but in a completely different setting from the original."

According to Mougeon, the project team plans to reach beyond linguistics and also focus on history and sociology. The team includes experts in linguistics, anthropology, history, geography and computer science. "We believe that you can only understand the evolution of language if you can actually place it in its broader socio-historical setting," said Mougeon.

. . .

The research team received the grant from the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives Program of the (SSHRC).

The project’s focus includes four centuries of history of French on the North American continent in three main colonial settings: Louisiana, New France, which is now Quebec, and Acadia.

Mougeon was also interviewed by the (video clip attached) and spoke about the study with CBC Radio Moncton, NB, March 17.

You can also read the project's .

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The dialogue sparked by the leaders mystifies 91��ɫ City Institute director Roger Keil, himself a newcomer from his native Germany in the 1990s. “I’m puzzled (that) the national debate in Central and Western Europe is a point of reference in Canada,” he said. “Those making the comments have a specific agenda. They’re right wing and are under various influences, some fascist.”

Citing France’s republic, Germany’s federation and Italy’s struggles to define itself during a wave of Tunisian immigration, Keil said Canada demonstrates vastly different policies and history.

Canada has the highest per-capita immigration rate in the world, driven by economic policy and family reunification. Multiculturalism in Canada was adopted as the official policy of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s government in the 1970s.

. . .

Our welcoming nature and immigration policies have created a critical mass of socio-ethno cultural groups, creating a mosaic of diversity that outweighs influences by camps and enclaves found in Europe, Dr. Keil said. “Europe has a different political spectrum,” he said. “They have outspoken nationalists pushed by fascist forces stirring up unrest. We don’t see those forces operating in 91��ɫ Region.”

Keil leads the SSHRC-funded Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century project, which is the first major research project to take stock of worldwide suburban developments in a systematic way.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The study, recently published in the journal Neuropsychologia looked at a rare disorder called prosopagnosia, in which the ability to visually identify faces is lost or severely impaired.

Researchers performed a series of experiments that gauged prosopagnosia sufferers' recognition of faces, objects and voices and other sounds, both separately and in varying combinations; the scientists compared these results to those of control subjects with normal brain functioning.

"We were interested in investigating the interactions between different types of sensory inputs," says lead researcher Jennifer Steeves (left), a professor of psychology in 91��ɫ’s . "For example, does seeing a person’s face and listening to them speaking at the same time offer more helpful information to identify that person, or is a single sensory input superior?"

Steeves’ experiments involved a patient who suffered brain damage from meningitis as a child. With extensive lesions on the right hemisphere and most of the ventral visual areas, he was unable to recognize familiar faces, facial expressions, objects, colours or words.

"Quite remarkably, even with these deficits, he was able to hold a job and maintain an independent lifestyle," Steeves says. "We wanted to find out what cognitive functions were compensating to help him achieve this."

In one experiment, participants were required to rapidly learn the identities of 10 individuals, using an image of a face paired with a voice.

Prior to this exercise, subjects were presented with grey-scale images of 110 female faces that had been stripped of distinguishing features. They were also fed auditory stimuli – a 20-second neutral passage spoken in English by one of 110 female voices. Participants were then tested on what they had learned in visual and auditory-only modes, and in combination.

Steeves and her colleagues found that control subjects relied more heavily on visual cues, while the patient with prosopagnosia used auditory information more expertly to recognize people. However, auditory cues didn’t help in identifying objects, leading researchers to believe that our processing of people and things occur in two different neurological pathways.

Untangling this web of sensory cues is important on more than one level, Steeves notes. "Our hope is that it will help not only our understanding of those with brain disorders, but also to understand how healthy brains function," she says.

The study, "Superior voice recognition in a patient with acquired prosopagnosia and object agnosia," is co-authored by Adria Hoover, a 91��ɫ psychology graduate student, and Jean-François Démonet, director of France’s Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM).

Steeves is one of the researchers based in 91��ɫ’s new state-of-the-art Sherman Health Science Research Centre, which officially opened on Sept. 14. She leads the Perceptual Neuroscience Laboratory, which is based on the building’s main level. Both Steeves and her lab are part of the .

The research was funded by the and France’s .

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer. Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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, a professor in 91��ɫ’s School of Human Resource Management, is the lead researcher for a -funded study which involved interviewing 45 qualified immigrants in Canada, Spain and France. The study looked at the barriers to career development for qualified immigrants in each country, how they coped with them and whether they were able to overcome them.

“These are people who consciously made this decision to move to a new country and had the education and resources to do so,” says Zikic. “It’s a highly skilled group.”

Left: Jelena Zikic

The study is one of three in Zikic’s research project “Investigating Labour Market Experiences of Immigrant Professionals (IPs) in Canada, the Role of Personal and Organizational Barriers to Career Success in the Host Country”. An article based on the study, “Crossing National Boundaries: A Typology of Qualified Immigrants’ Career Orientations”, co-authored by Zikic, Jaime Bonache of the ESADE Business School in Spain and Jean-Luc Cerdin of the ESSEC Business School in France, has been published in the July issue of the .

In terms of experience in dealing with immigrants, Canada is considered the "country of immigrants", Spain is just beginning to get an influx of immigrants, and France falls somewhere in between, says Zikic. Despite the differences, what researchers found was that immigrants in each country faced similar significant barriers to the labour market, such as a lack of recognition for their foreign career training and experience, learning how to navigate the labour expectations of a new country, and difficulty creating new social networks and tapping into local resources to assist in finding a job.

“It is a very challenging journey that these people take. Getting work doesn’t happen overnight,” says Zikic. “A lot of these immigrants had great careers in their own country. They had to give up quite a bit. Many of them had a lot of status, friends, a network, and it all disappeared when they entered the host country.”

The study sought to understand the underlying causes of underemployment for qualified immigrants from professional backgrounds and how they managed physical and psychological mobility.

What they found was the subjective experiences of qualified immigrants were interdependent with the social, economic and cultural realities, such as the structure of local labour markets and the need to retrain. Older immigrants were often more resistant to retraining and re-education, believing they were too old. As a result, they were more disappointed with the experience and had less success in finding work in their field.

Those who embraced the new challenges, about 24 per cent of those interviewed, were extremely positive about career success in the new country, while the majority��– 49 per cent��– adapted to their new circumstances and were successful at either adapting their careers or crafting new ones, although many were in survival jobs. The adaptive group understood the reality of having to retrain or get more education and was prepared to deal with the circumstances. “They had this sort of future orientation; they knew good things would come eventually,” says Zikic. The remaining 27 per cent found the obstacles impossible to overcome as they often had psychological barriers as well, such as age or other constraining circumstances.

Immigrants used six strategies in finding work��– maintaining motivation, managing identity, developing new credentials, developing local know-how, building a new social network and understanding career success – but again, how successful they were was dependent on whether they embraced, adapted or resisted the challenges.

“It’s incredible how much talent is searching for the right job and a lot of immigrants just give up,” says Zikic. “We often call this the brain waste; they’re underemployed.”

It is important when devising programs for immigrants to keep in mind the interplay between subjective experiences and the objective realities, she says. Most studies look at one or the other, but little has been done on how each affects the other, and more research is needed.

Zikic also notes that in Canada there is a need for more programs that offer occupation-specific mentoring to immigrants, such as The Mentoring Partnership available through the .

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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