Sudha Arunachalam is a Professor of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and M.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California.
In her research program, she examines how infants, toddlers, and preschoolers acquire their native language. She studies acquisition in children who are developing typically, children with autism spectrum disorder, and children with language delay. In collaborations with researchers around the world, she has studied these issues in languages other than English, including ASL, Mandarin, 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. She is an ASHA fellow.