
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.