Megha Sundara

Datos Biográficos

ID1463686
NOMBREMegha Sundara
NOMBRESMegha
APELLIDOSundara
FIRMASUNDARA M
AFILIACIONESUniversity of California, Los Angeles
ORCID0000-0003-0028-750X
VERIFICADOSí
TOTAL DE OBRAS28
TOTAL DE CITAS14
TOTAL COMO AUTOR28
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN2006
AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN2026
ÍNDICE H2

  • The acquisition of native language phonotactics

    Open AccessMegha Sundara, Canaan M Brei et al.ARTICLECognition2026

    Languages differ in their phonotactics - the restrictions on positions and sequencing of segments. Many phonotactic restrictions are specific to a given language, and therefore must be learned from the input infants receive. First, we used data from adult experiments to identify maximally contrastive segmental regularities in English. Then, in three infant experiments, we showed that sensitivity to segmental regularities is induced by 5 months of…

  • Remote collection of language samples from three-year-olds

    Open AccessJinyoung Jo, Megha SundaraARTICLEJournal of Child Language2026

    We characterised language samples collected remotely from typically developing three-year-olds by comparing them against independent language samples collected in person from age-matched peers with and without language delays. Forty-eight typically developing, English-learning three-year-olds were administered a picture description task via Zoom. The in-person comparison groups were two sets of independent language samples from age-matched typica…

  • Phonological Choices Drive F0 Range Expansion and Lengthening in Bengali and English Infant-Directed Speech

    Open AccessKristine M Yu, Sameer Ud Dowla Khan et al.ARTICLELanguages2026

    This study builds on a small body of work, all on Japanese, demonstrating how intonational phonology is critical for understanding prosodic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) relative to adult-directed speech. We performed similar analyses on simulated infant-directed speech vs. reading of a story in English and Bengali: two languages that – unlike Japanese – both have stress and do not use fundamental frequency (F0) to signal changes …

  • Does perceptual learning for segmental phonotactics generalize across talkers

    Open AccessJeremy Steffman, Megha SundaraARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2026

    In this study we present a set of experiments testing the conditions under which listeners generalize perceptual learning for biphone phonotactics across talkers. Listeners were exposed to skewed CV biphone distributions at the endpoints of a phonetic VOT continuum with more ambiguous steps having an unbiased (flat) distribution. We first replicated previous findings that listeners generalized learning from biasing contexts to perceive the higher…

  • Infants discover English suffixes allomorph by allomorph

    Open AccessKevin Liang, Megha SundaraARTICLEJournal of Child Language2025

    Recent research has shown that 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with -s, like babs, that are embedded in passages, with just the stem bab, demonstrating an early sensitivity to morphological relatedness. This study builds on these findings by investigating the role of allomorphy in early morphological acquisition. We tested whether infants relate novel words suffixed with [-z] and [-s] allomorphs of the -s suffix and their stems. We find …

  • Modeling How Suffixes Are Learned in Infancy

    Open AccessCanaan M Brei, Bruce P Hayes et al.ARTICLECognitive Science2025Referencias: 70

    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 mode…

  • English-Learning Infants' Developing Sensitivity to Intonation Contours

    Open AccessMegha Sundara, Sónia FrotaARTICLELanguages2025Referencias: 53

    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 ris…

  • The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology

    Open AccessEllen Broselow, Esther L Brown et al.BOOKCambridge Handbook of Bilingual…2024

    Bilingualism and the study of speech sounds are two of the largest areas of inquiry in linguistics. This Handbook sits at the intersection of these fields, providing a comprehensive overview of the most recent, cutting-edge work on the sound systems of adult and child bilinguals. Bringing together contributions from an international team of world-leading experts, it covers all aspects of the speech perception, production and processing of bilingu…

  • Disentangling the Role of Biphone Probability From Neighborhood Density in the Perception of Nonwords

    Open AccessJeremy Steffman, Megha SundaraARTICLELanguage and Speech2024Referencias: 85

    In six experiments we explored how biphone probability and lexical neighborhood density influence listeners’ categorization of vowels embedded in nonword sequences. We found independent effects of each. Listeners shifted categorization of a phonetic continuum to create a higher probability sequence, even when neighborhood density was controlled. Similarly, listeners shifted categorization to create a nonword from a denser neighborhood, even when …

  • Phonetic variation in English infant-directed speech

    Open AccessEkaterina A Khlystova, Adam J Chong et al.ARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2023Citada por: 1Referencias: 89

    Learning sound categories is central to language acquisition – but we know little about the extent of phonetic variability in the learner’s input. In this study, we phonetically annotated coronal segments (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, and /n/) in a corpus of naturalistic American English infant-directed speech (IDS). We did not find evidence that IDS is consistently more canonical than adult-directed speech (ADS), challenging the notion of IDS as a learni…

  • Spanish input accelerates bilingual infants' segmentation of English words

    Open AccessVictoria Mateus, Victoria Mateu et al.ARTICLECognition2022

    We asked whether increased exposure to iambs, two-syllable words with stress on the second syllable (e.g., guitar), by way of another language - Spanish - facilitates English learning infants' segmentation of iambs. Spanish has twice as many iambic words (40%) compared to English (20%). Using the Headturn Preference Procedure we tested bilingual Spanish and English learning 8-month-olds' ability to segment English iambs. Monolingual English learn…

  • Stem similarity modulates infants' acquisition of phonological alternations

    Open AccessMegha Sundara, James White et al.ARTICLECognition2021

  • A Multilab Study of Bilingual Infants

    Open AccessKrista Byers-Heinlein, Angeline Sin Mei Tsui et al.ARTICLEAdvances in Methods and Practices…2021

    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 …

  • Exposure to a second language in infancy alters speech production

    Open AccessMegha Sundara, Nancy Ward et al.ARTICLEBilingualism Language and Cognition2020

    We evaluated the impact of exposure to a second language on infants’ emerging speech production skills. We compared speech produced by three groups of 12-month-old infants while they interacted with interlocutors who spoke to them in Spanish and English: monolingual English-learning infants who had previously received 5 hours of exposure to a second language (Spanish), English- and Spanish-learning simultaneous bilinguals, and monolingual English…

  • A multi-lab study of bilingual infants

    Krista Byers-Heinlein, Angeline Tsui et al.PREPRINT2020

    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 …

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

    Open AccessMichael C Frank, Katie Alcock et al.ARTICLEAdvances in Methods and Practices…2020

    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) as…

  • Cue-shifting between acoustic cues

    Open AccessMeng Yang, Megha SundaraARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2019Citada por: 1Referencias: 64

  • Why do children pay more attention to grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences

    Open AccessMegha SundaraARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for the salience of grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences. We measured 22-month-olds’ listening t…

  • Intonation Plays a Role in Language Discrimination by Infants

    Open AccessAdam J Chong, Chad Vicenik et al.ARTICLEInfancy2018

    Previous research on infant language discrimination has focused primarily on the role of prosody, specifically rhythmic timing cues. This, however, ignores the potentially useful role that intonation, another aspect of prosody, might play in aiding discrimination. In this article, we investigated how and when American English‐learning infants discriminate between prosodically similar languages, specifically American English and German, focusing o…

  • Fourteen-month-olds’ decontextualized understanding of words for absent objects

    Open AccessKristi Hendrickson, Megha SundaraARTICLEJournal of Child Language2017

    The majority of research examining infants’ decontextualized word knowledge comes from studies in which words and pictures are presented simultaneously. However, comprehending utterances about unseen objects is a hallmark of language. Do infants demonstrate decontextualized absent object knowledge early in the second year of life? Further, to what extent do words evoke strictly prototypical representations of absent objects? To investigate these …

  • Perceptual Similarity Modulates Context Effects in Online Compensation for Phonological Variation

    Open AccessAdam J Chong, Adam Chong et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the Annual…2016

    Using a cross-modal word identification task and an eye-tracking visual-world experiment, we investigated the importance of phonological context in the recovery of tap variants of /t/- and /d/-final words in American English. In Experiment 1, listeners were less accurate when they heard a tap variant of a /t/ word in a non-licensing environment (before a consonant) than when they heard it in a licensing environment (before an unstressed vowel). C…

  • Segmentation of vowel-initial words is facilitated by function words

    Open AccessYunjung Kim, Yun Jung Kim et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2015

    Within the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1–1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not 0;8 are able to segment vowel-initial words that immediately follow the function word the [ði], whil…

  • Early word segmentation in infants acquiring Parisian French

    Open AccessThierry Nazzi, KARIMA MERSAD et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2014

    Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same language have partly different segmentation abilities, and whether segmenting a non-native dialect h…

  • The role of intonation in language and dialect discrimination by adults

    Open AccessChad Vicenik, Megha SundaraARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2013Citada por: 2Referencias: 35

  • Word Segmentation in Monolingual Infants Acquiring Canadian English and Canadian French

    Open AccessLinda Polka, Megha SundaraARTICLEInfancy2012

    In five experiments, we tested segmentation of word forms from natural speech materials by 8‐month‐old monolingual infants who are acquiring Canadian French or Canadian English. These two languages belong to different rhythm classes; Canadian French is syllable‐timed and Canada English is stress‐timed. Findings of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 show that 8‐month‐olds acquiring either Canadian French or Canadian English can segment bi‐syllable words in t…