Biography

Pauline Wolfer comes from the Swiss-Franco-German cross-border region of Alsace, thus multilingualism has always been an important facet of her daily life. As a speech-therapist, she was intrigued by the vast heterogeneity of competencies in the different languages of her bilingual patients and observed the limitations of existing assessment tools to deal with this specificity and thus allow accurate diagnosis of speech disorders in multilingual settings. In order to better decipher the mechanisms underpinning the deficits she was treating and to learn more about language processing, she obtained a master’s degree in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience at Aix-Marseille University. 

Fascinated by the numerous aspects of multilingualism, she will now combine her clinical experience with research to better understand its impact on cognition of typically developing children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.