Wallace E. Lambert

Wallace Earl Lambert (1922 to 2009) was a Canadian psychologist and a professor of psychology at McGill University from 1954 to 1990. He was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, raised in Taunton, Massachusetts, studied at Brown University and took his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. Regarded as one of the founders of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, he is known for work in social and cross-cultural psychology, including intergroup attitudes and the matched-guise technique, and for research on bilingualism, including the finding that bilinguals can outperform monolinguals on intelligence tests. He was also associated with the St. Lambert experiment that led to French immersion education in Canada. Among his graduate students at McGill was Allan Paivio, along with Robert Gardner, G. Richard Tucker and others.