Rachel Dudley

Rachel Dudley received her BA in linguistics from New York University and her PhD in linguistics from the University of Maryland. Her main area of research is language acquisition, with a particular focus on the development of semantic and pragmatic competence, for phenomena including attitude verbs and presupposition triggers.
What does the language-learning child have to bring to the table to develop adult-like competence? And what does the environment have to provide to support language acquisition? To provide insights on these fronts, Rachel’s work relies on behavioral experiments with children and adults, eye-gaze methods with infants, and corpus analyses of naturalistic speech, all informed by insights drawn from the linguistic, psychological and philosophical literatures.