Project Leader: Kai Ian Leung 

Project Description: How does a bilingual environment affect language and cognition (thinking) after a childhood stroke? In this collaboration with SickKids Hospital, we compared the outcomes of monolingual and bilingual children at multiple time points after their stroke. We also considered certain patient and stroke-related factors that might have affected their outcomes, like sex and the age that they had their stroke. Overall, we found that a bilingual environment did not harm the development of language and cognition. Interestingly, we also found that if a child had a stroke in the first year of life and grew up in a bilingual home their expressive language showed better recovery than those children whose family spoke only one language.