Sudha Arunachalam, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences
Director, BU Child Language Lab

Education

Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), 2007
M.A., Psychology, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), 2003
B.A., Linguistics/Psychology, University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA), 2001

Early language development, Language processing, Lexical and syntactic representation

Learning verb meanings from syntax alone; Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting; Montreal, Canada; March, 2011 (with SR Waxman)
Event completion requirements of Hindi and English perfectives; UMass Workshop on South Asian Syntax and Semantics; Amherst, MA; March, 2011
Fast mapping from argument structure alone; Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting; Pittsburgh, PA; January, 2011
Verb learning in English- and Mandarin-acquiring 24-month-olds; Boston University Conference on Language Development; Boston, MA; November, 2010 (with E Leddon, X Fu, H Gong, L Wang, SR Waxman)
Specifying the role of linguistic information in verb learning; Boston University Conference on Language Development; Boston, MA; November, 2010 (with SR Waxman)
Syntactic bootstrapping from the serial verb construction in Korean; Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting; Denver, CO; April, 2009 (with Y Choi, H Song, Y Choi, JC Trueswell)
24-month-old infants’ use of syntactic context in noun and verb learning; Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting; Denver, CO; April, 2009 (with SR Waxman)
Projectionism, Non-Projectionism and the acquisition of argument structure; Verb Concepts: Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representations and Processing; Montreal, Canada; October, 2008

Arunachalam S, Waxman SR. Grammatical form and semantic context in verb learning. Language Learning and Development. In press.
Arunachalam S, Waxman SR. Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds. Cognition. 2010;114:442-446.
Arunachalam S, Waxman SR. Language and conceptual development. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. 2010;1:548-558.
Almor A, Aronoff JM, MacDonald MC, Gonnerman LM, Kempler D, Hintiryan H, Hayes UL, Arunachalam S, Andersen ES. A common mechanism in verb and noun naming deficits in Alzheimer’s patients. Brain and Language. 2009;111:8-19.
Almor A, Arunachalam S, Strickland B. When the creampuff beat the boxer: Cost and function in reading metaphoric reference. Metaphor and Symbol. 2007;22:169-193.
Aronoff JM, Gonnerman LM, Almor A, Arunachalam S, Kempler D, Andersen ES. Information content versus relational knowledge: Semantic deficits in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. 2005;44:21-35.