。Welcome!

Welcome to my website! I am a postdoctoral trainee at the University of Alberta. Here I will write about my experiences, academic activities, thoughts in daily life, and share clinical and academic resources. English is my second language and I write a lot in Chinese. I hope I'll post blogs in both English and Chinese here.

。About

My name is 林悠然 Lin Youran [lin˦˥ jo͡ʊ˥ ɻan˦˥], and I'd happily go by "Youran" as in "You ran a 100-meter" if that's easier to pronounce! I am from Harbin, China, and spent seven years in Beijing studying Linguistics. I came to Edmonton, Canada in 2018 to study Speech-Language Pathology. Fun fact: Harbin and Edmonton are twin cities!

"When feeling uncertain about future directions, take the more challenging roads." This is what has led me to this challenging but beautiful journey. It took me all the way from Chinese Language and Literature to Linguistics, to Phonetics, to Child Phonology Development, and to SLP. It took me from the other side of the earth to Canada. It took me from an undergraduate student to a postdoc trainee. Yet the journey still goes on.

I just completed a combined program of MScSLP and PhD, which means I took both the professional training in SLP and doing a doctoral research project at the same time. It was an intense program but I really enjoyed it. I'm especially interested in working with clients with speech disorders, including speech sound, voice, resonance, fluency, and motor speech disorders. After finishing my clinical program, I registered as a speech-language pathologist. My research interests include speech and language development in bilingual children and second language learners, the Chinese speech and language in multilingual and multicultural contexts, and and diversity in the field of speech-language pathology.

In the past five years (and will in the future years), I worked with my doctoral supervisors, Dr. Karen Pollock and Dr. Fangfang Li, on a project about the speech development in children who are enrolled in the public Mandarin-English bilingual education programs. I hope this will help the children from Chinese families maintain their heritage language, and help the children who are learning Mandarin as a second language to use it to communicate more effectively. During my defence, Dr. Benjamin V. Tucker asked me to pitch my thesis in a couple of sentences. Here is my answer:

At this moment, I am moving on to a postdoctoral position supervised by Dr. Johanne Paradis. We will look at bilingual development in children with special education needs. I am very excited to work here and expand my research interests in bilingualism to clinical populations!

On the side of my coursework and research, I provide consultation for international students who are preparing for their applications and who want to improve their oral communication. I also enjoy cooking and singing a lot. I love talking about research with my partner Kris who studies Reinforcement Learning in the Department of Computing Sciences. They are the talented creator of this website and a penguin lover.

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