Sudha Arunachalam

Sudha Arunachalam is Vice Dean for Research and 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 first language. She studies development in children who are developing typically, autistic children, and late-talking toddlers. In collaborations with researchers around the world, she studies these issues in languages other than English, including Czech, German, Korean, and Mandarin. She is particularly interested in the learning mechanisms underlying language development 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 Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Acquisition. She is a recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and an ASHA fellow.