Becker Award
Claudia MacDonald wins 2026 Becker Undergraduate Award
Claudia MacDonald has won the annual Becker Award for her assignment titled Early vs. Late Bilingual Neural Responses to Unexpected Code-Switching. You can read it here. This project was part of coursework for Dr. Henny Yeung's class Neurolinguistics: LING 415.
What inspired you to study Linguistics at SFU?
I am currently completing my undergraduate degree in Linguistics because my goal is to pursue a career in speech-language pathology. A little over halfway through my degree, I decided to add a minor in Early Learning to gain more academic experience in children鈥檚 learning and development.
I am also completing the Certificate in the Linguistics of Speech Science program. I鈥檓 hoping to begin my master鈥檚 degree in speech-language pathology in the next year and then eventually work in the field. I would also love the opportunity to work abroad at some point after completing my education.
Please share about your experience in Neurolinguistics: LING 415.
I really enjoyed taking Neurolinguistics: LING 415 because it gave me the opportunity to explore the more scientific side of linguistics in more depth than I had in other courses. I found it really interesting to learn about the research and neural processes behind language and communication.
For this assignment, I really enjoyed having the freedom to choose a topic that was both relevant and interesting to me. As someone who is bilingual, I found it fascinating to learn more about the neural processes involved in bilingual language use and how then brain responds during different aspects of bilingual speech. I also enjoyed the process of combining research findings from different sources with my own perspectives from what I learned in the course.
The most challenging part of writing this paper was narrowing down a specific and original topic. I knew I wanted to focus on bilingualism because it has always been an area of linguistics that interested me, but because it is such a well-studied field, it was challenging to find a topic that allowed me to explore a unique perspective.
Prof. Henny Yeung was a very passionate and supportive instructor, which made the course really enjoyable. He had a lot of enthusiasm about the material and was very supportive and encouraging. I was a bit nervous to take LING 415 at first because neurolinguistics is an intimidating field of linguistics. However, Henny made sure that we had all the resources and support that we needed to succeed and he was always willing to help whenever we had questions.
How does it feel to win the Becker Award?
It feels really exciting to win the Becker Award. Receiving this recognition has been a huge confidence boost, especially because I have struggled with my academic confidence in the past. I felt proud of this paper when I completed it, so it is really nice to know that others saw value in it as well.