Athulya Aravind, PhD

All of us carry around in our heads knowledge of at least one language. Athulya Aravind's research focuses on how people acquire this knowledge. She combines formal and experimental methods to chart how children’s linguistic abilities grow and change over the first few years of life. A primary focus of this research is determining where language acquisition builds upon general, non-linguistic cognitive abilities and where it follows a specialized, independent course.

behavioral testing  

cognition ;  development ;  language ;  learning  

Aravind received her BA in Linguistics and English in 2011 from Northeastern University and her PhD in Linguistics in 2018 from MIT. Following a postdoc at Harvard’s Lab for Developmental Studies and a faculty position at MIT, she joined Yale in 2025 to start the Child Language Development Lab.