Dr Sudha Arunachalam

Visiting Research Fellow
Dr Sudha Arunachalam

Dr Sudha Arunachalam

Visiting Research Fellow, September - December 2022

Home Institution: New York University

Sudha Arunachalam is an Associate Professor of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and M.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. In her research program, she examines how infants, toddlers, and preschoolers acquire their native language. She studies children who are developing typically and children with delayed language development. In collaborations with researchers all over the world, she has studied children who are acquiring languages other than English, such as Turkish and Korean. She is particularly interested in the learning mechanisms underlying language acquisition and in how caregiver-child interactions support learning. This interdisciplinary work integrates insights from the fields of communication disorders, linguistics, and cognitive and developmental psychology, and it involves several behavioral methods with a focus on eye-tracking. Sudha has authored dozens of journal articles, and her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and several private foundations. She was previously an Editor of the Language section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and she is the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Acquisition.

Project Title: Language in Children with Autism: The Role Autistic Parents Play
Research on language development in autistic children has highlighted the role of caregiver-child interaction. However, whether the caregiver is also autistic has not been considered in this work. Given recent research on the "double empathy problem", which suggests that autistic adults communicate with each other just as successfully as nonautistic adults communicate with each other, and that groups consisting of individuals from both groups have the most difficulty communicating, it seems likely that caregivers of autistic children who are autistic themselves may have different strategies for interacting with their young children. I propose to think about how to test this hypothesis with young children and their caregivers to explore how caregiver-child interactions can support children's language development.