MRC Brown Bag: The role of first language differences on cognitive and language performance by Dr. Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah

The differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers are generally summarized as a bilingual disadvantage in language measures but a bilingual advantage on cognitive measures. In this talk, I will present findings from highly proficient bilinguals that challenge these generalizations. These findings have implications in the development of unbiased language and cognitive measures to evaluate bilingual speakers in clinical and educational settings. I will also present data from bilingual speakers with language disorders (following brain damage) that illustrates the association between language and cognitive performance. This finding has theoretical implications for our understanding of language representation in bilingual speakers.

Dr. Faroqi-Shah is an Associate Professor and Director of the Aphasia Research Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her undergraduate and Masters degrees in Hearing and Speech Sciences at the All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, India. She completed her PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University with Dr. Cynthia Thompson.