Dr. Sudha Arunachalam

Biography

Sudha Arunachalam is a Professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at NYU Steinhardt. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics, an M.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her research program examines how infants, toddlers, and preschoolers acquire language. She studies the development of children who develop typically as well as those on the autism spectrum and those with language delays. Sudha has collaborated with researchers around the world and has studied language issues beyond English, including Czech, German, Korean, and Mandarin. She is particularly interested in the learning mechanisms underlying language acquisition and how caregiver-child interactions support this learning. Her interdisciplinary work integrates insights from the fields of communication disorders, linguistics, and cognitive developmental psychology and often involves behavioral methods such as 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 various private foundations. She has served as Editor of the Language section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and currently holds the position of Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Acquisition. As a respected faculty member, she contributes to the rigorous training offered in the Communicative Sciences and Disorders Program.

Research Interests