Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Executive function in aphasia: is there a bilingual advantage?
    (2013) Baughman, Susan; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Previous studies have demonstrated that there is a bilingual advantage in neurotypical populations on tasks of executive functions, particularly inhibition. However, little research has been conducted on a population with aphasia. This study examined whether bilingual persons with aphasia (BPWA) and monolingual persons with aphasia (MPWA) displayed any differences on tasks of executive functions. Four BPWA and four MPWA matched for age and Western Aphasia Battery subtest scores were administered a linguistic Stroop task, a nonlinguistic Stroop task, a trail-making task, and a non-verbal memory task. Results demonstrated that the two groups did not have significantly different scores on any of the tasks. While both groups of PWA were slower than neurotypical adults on reaction time measures, accuracy on all four tasks was unimpaired and within the normal range. These results, although preliminary given the small sample size and high performance accuracy, suggest that there may not be a clear "bilingual advantage" on tasks of executive function.