Research summary
The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to restrict Canadians’ mobility to control the transmission of the virus. But this tactic has come at a significant price for certain sectors of the population. Dr. Victor Kuperman, Canada Research Chair in Psycholinguistics, is investigating how the pandemic has affected the social mobility of two vulnerable segments of the Canadian population: university students and adults aged 65 and up.
Kuperman and his research team are conducting a large-scale, multi-annual project to document the short-and long-term harmful effects the pandemic has had on university students’ reading comprehension and related academic skills. They are also collecting stories produced by older adults, both before and during the pandemic, and conducting computational linguistic analyses to determine the emotional and cognitive repercussions of prolonged social isolation for this group. They also aim to develop a non-invasive screening tool for detecting loneliness.