ATSU-ASHS Speech-Language Pathology program student, faculty present at conference
Posted: June 14, 2023
A.T. Still University-Arizona School of Health Sciences (ATSU-ASHS) Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) program student Ashley Mixon became the first SLP student to present at a national research/clinical conference when she presented at the California Speech-Language and Hearing Association 2023 Convention earlier this year.
The poster, “Inhibition and switching advantage in proficient bilinguals,” is Mixon’s project under the direction of Beatriz Barragan Serrano, PhD, associate professor in the ATSU-ASHS SLP program, and in collaboration with faculty and students from the Department of Communication Disorders at California State University, Los Angeles, and the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The presentation included preliminary data of a study exploring the differential relationship of inhibition and shifting task performance with bilingualism and linguistic proficiency in monolingual and bilingual adults. Monolingual (N=39) and Spanish/English bilingual (N=43) adults have participated so far in the study. The preliminary results suggest that an executive function (EF) advantage could be more associated with linguistic proficiency than with bilingualism per se. These results, if confirmed with a large sample size, could underscore the significance of future research investigating the connection between continuous measures of bilingualism and EF without the need to include pure monolinguals for comparison.