Rena Helms-Park

Biography

Rena Helms-Park (Ph.D., University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Language Studies. She holds a graduate appointment in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto St. George.

Her ongoing SSHRC-based research centres on the psycholinguistics of childhood reading acquisition, specifically on the predictors of reading difficulty and success in Hindi-Urdu and Romanian. She has recently completed two projects on childhood trilingualism, one that analyzes children’s narrative macrostructure and microstructure in three languages, and the other that charts the progress of a trilingual child with reading difficulties in French immersion. A long-standing ongoing project examines cognate processing in languages like Romanian, Ukrainian, French, and English.