Speech Language Pathology Student Receives NIH Travel Award
Isabel Cano, a first-year student in the Master of Speech Language Pathology Program (SLP Program), is the recent recipient of a competitive Student Travel Award from the National Institutes of Health. Cano will use the funding to attend the 40th Annual Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders (SRCLD) in Madison, Wisconsin this June.
Cano’s mentor, Dr. Connie Summers, associate professor of Speech Language Pathology, encouraged her to submit the application and provided a letter of support. The two have been working together for the last two and a half years in Summers’ Research in Bilingual Language Learning Lab, beginning when Cano was still an undergraduate. Cano now serves as Summers’ research assistant and lab manager.
At the upcoming SRCLD symposium, Cano will present their project, “Grammatical Error Patterns in Young Spanish-English Bilingual Children,” which sought to answer which grammatical errors were most common for three- to five-year old bilingual children in English and Spanish, and to gather more knowledge about the differences in grammatical errors for bilingual children. The study utilized a picture description task developed by Eisenberg and Guo (2013). Based on the study results, which did show differences in the type of errors across the two languages, Cano and Summers suggested that researchers and clinicians should expect different grammatical patterns across languages, and also suggested that further research using larger sample sizes was warranted.
In addition to her notable research profile – which also includes two presentations (with a third planned this fall) at the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA) and three COURI symposium presentations as an undergraduate – Cano also served on the ASHA 2018 minority student leadership program and was recently elected as UTEP’s president for the National Student Speech Language Hearing Association.
After graduation in May 2020, Cano plans to stay in El Paso and work with both monolingual and bilingual children in a medical setting. Her experiences in the lab and exposure to research have also sparked a potential interest in pursuing a Ph.D. in the future.
“These experiences have provided me with many challenges and can possibly introduce questions that will motivate my curiosity and lead to a potential dissertation topic,” she said.
For more information about the Speech Language Pathology Program, please visit: https://www.utep.edu/chs/slp/
Go Miners!