Megha Sundara

About

Megha Sundara is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA and serves as the Department Chair. She earned her Ph.D. in 2005 from McGill University. Her research focuses on various aspects of language development, phonetics, phonology, and speech perception, with particular attention to infant language acquisition, phonotactics, morphological segmentation, and prosody. Her work integrates experimental studies, computational modeling, and cross-linguistic analyses to understand how infants and children acquire and process language, as well as how perceptual and production mechanisms develop over time. Throughout her career, Sundara has made significant contributions to the understanding of early language development, including infants' sensitivity to phonotactic cues, morphological structures, and prosodic features. Her research has explored how bilingual infants segment words, how infants discriminate subtle phonetic contrasts, and how exposure to different languages influences speech perception and production. She has also investigated the perceptual and production links in speech development, as well as the effects of language experience on phonological and lexical processing. Her work is widely published in leading journals and presented at international conferences, establishing her as a prominent figure in the field of language acquisition and phonetics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Developmental psychology
• Natural Language Processing
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Communication
• Artificial Intelligence
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference

  Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science · 2020 · 352 citations

  Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theo…

  DOI

• A Multilab Study of Bilingual Infants: Exploring the Preference for Infant-Directed Speech

  Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science · 2021 · 77 citations

  From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the multi-lab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared lab-ma…

  DOI

• A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

  2020 · 20 citations

  From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multi-lab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared lab-ma…

  PublisherDOI

• English-Learning Infants’ Developing Sensitivity to Intonation Contours

  Languages · 2025-06-20 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In four experiments, we investigated when and how English-learning infants perceive intonation contours that signal prosodic units. Using visual habituation, we probed infants’ ability to discriminate disyllabic sequences with a fall versus a rise in pitch on the final syllable, a salient cue used to distinguish statements from questions. First, we showed that at 8 months, English-learning infants can distinguish statement falls from question rises, as has been reported previously for their Euro…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Modeling How Suffixes Are Learned in Infancy

  Cognitive Science · 2025-03-01 · 2 citations

  article

  Recent experimental work offers evidence that infants become aware of suffixes at a remarkably early age, as early as 6 months for the English suffix -s. Here, we seek to understand this ability though the strategy of computational modeling. We evaluate a set of distributional learning models for their ability to mimic the observed acquisition order for various suffixes when trained on a corpus of child-directed speech. Our best-performing model first segments utterances of the corpus into candi…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Development of Native Language Preference: Behavioral and Physiological Indices

  NSF · $403k · 2010–2015

• A new approach to computational model evaluation: Benchmarking against infant experimental data

  NSF · $550k · 2022–2026

• Morphological acquisition in early infancy: Experimental and computational studies

  NSF · $450k · 2020–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Linda Polka

  Centre for Research on Brain Language and Music

  20 shared

• Robert Chen

  IFC Research (United Kingdom)

  17 shared

• Aravind Kumar Namasivayam

  University of Toronto

  16 shared

• Thierry Nazzi

  12 shared

• Katherine Demuth

  Macquarie University

  10 shared

• Jae Yung Song

  University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

  9 shared

• Patricia K. Kuhl

  University of Washington

  8 shared

• Judit Gervain

  8 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Tim Hunterh-29
• Jessica Retth-17
• Anoop Mahajanh-16