Dr. Megha Sundara
Director of the Language Acquisition Lab
B.Sc. (Speech Pathology & Audiology)
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing
M.Sc. (Speech Pathology & Audiology)
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing
Ph.D. (Communication Sciences & Disorders) McGill University
Dr. Laurel Perkins
B.A. (Literary Studies)
University of Toronto
Ph.D. (Linguistics)
University of Maryland
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. I’m interested in how infants and young children represent the structure of sentences they hear at each stage of development, and what cognitive resources enable them to learn from the speech around them in order to acquire the grammar of their first language. I use experimental behavioral methods to identify infants’ sentence representations, and computational methods to model their learning mechanisms. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. I earned my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park.