Arunachalam Receives Whiting Fellowship to Further Child Development Research

Dr. Sudha Arunachalam, assistant professor in the department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences and director of the BU Child Language Lab, has received the prestigious 2015 Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship Award.

Arunachalam will use the grant to fund travel to South Korea where she’ll extend her research with American and Korean toddlers, specifically examining differences in language acquisition across cultures.

By enabling educators to study abroad, the Fellowship aims to “stimulate and broaden the minds of teachers so as to improve and enhance the quality of their instruction”.

Arunachalam’s scholarly interests are in the areas of language acquisition and language processing. She is particularly interested in how children acquire lexical and event semantic properties of verbs, how they represent these along with their syntactic properties, and how they access these representations during online comprehension–in both typical and atypical development.

She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and an M.A. in Psychology, both from the University of Pennsylvania.