Bilingual Attention and Memory (BAM) Lab

About

Ileana Ratiu, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a Clinical Associate Professor and Program Director of the M.S. in Communication Disorders at Arizona State University. She completed her M.S. in Communication Disorders and Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. As a licensed speech-language pathologist, she works with patients with a history of traumatic brain injury and stroke. 

Her research examines differences in executive function, memory, language processing, and reading comprehension in monolingual and bilingual adults with acquired neurogenic disorders. She examines how traumatic brain injury (TBI) affects working memory, episodic memory, executive function, and language control in young bilingual adults. A unique aspect to this research is that she utilizes both standard behavioral measures and experimental physiological measures (e.g., eye-tracking), which allows her to connect behavioral performance to fine-grained indicators of cognitive performance. The ultimate goal is to address the disparity between self-reported cognitive deficits following traumatic brain injury and performance on current standardized neuropsychological measures, particularly in underserved populations. Towards this goal, she translates established empirical measures into novel, functional measures designed to be more sensitive to subtle cognitive deficits, thereby leading to better assessment and health outcomes in individuals with traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Ratiu has presented research findings at numerous national and international conferences and has numerous first-author or co-authored published studies in peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Brain and Language, and Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Additionally, she has presented the results of her studies at numerous international conferences.