PhD - Hearing and Speech Sciences
Vanderbilt University

Pumpki Lei Su
Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Language development and caregiver-child interaction in children with autism and bilingual children; language assessment in bilingual children.
972-883-2384
CR 1.322
Language Interaction and Language Acquisition in Children (LILAC) Lab
Curriculum Vitae
ORCID
Currently accepting undergraduate students
Not currently accepting graduate students
Professional Preparation
MS - Interdisciplinary Science in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University
BS - Communication Sciences and Disorders; Linguistics
Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Research Areas
Dr. Su’s research focuses on language development and caregiver-child interaction in children with autism spectrum disorder and bilingual children. Theoretically guided by the Transactional Model of Language Development, she focuses on the influence of child-level factors, input-level factors, and their interaction on language learning in her research. She uses various methods in her work, including observational methods, eye-tracking, naturalistic home language recordings, and language sample analysis to understand how children with different linguistic experiences acquire language.The long-term goal of her work is to (a) identify malleable aspects of caregiver-child interaction that optimize language outcomes in diverse groups of children, and (b) develop culturally and linguistically sensitive tools to assess language and identify language disorders in children from diverse backgrounds.
Publications
Canonical babbling trajectories across the first year of life in autism and typical development 2024 - Other
Developmental language disorder in Chinese children: A systematic review of research from 1997 to 2022 2023 - Journal Article
Awards
Advancing Academic-Research Career (AARC) Award - ASHA [2023]
Appointments
Assistant Professor
University of Texas at Dallas [2022–Present]
University of Texas at Dallas [2022–Present]
Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Delaware [2020–2022]
University of Delaware [2020–2022]
Clinical Fellow in Speech-Language Pathology
Late Talkers Consulting [2018–2020]
Late Talkers Consulting [2018–2020]
Projects
Word learning from infant-directed speech in bilingual children
2022/01 Research on early language development has focused disproportionally on monolingual children. Given the prevalence of bilingualism worldwide and in the US, more research is urgently needed to generate language development theories that address diverse language learners and to better support language development in bilingual children. This study focuses on word learning from infant-directed speech (IDS; also known as "motherese"/"parenthese"/"babytalk") in Spanish-English bilingual toddlers and incorporates eye-gaze measures and all-day recording data.Word learning from infant-directed speech in autistic toddlers
This study focuses on word learning from infant-directed speech (IDS; also known as "motherese"/"parenthese"/"babytalk") in autistic toddlers. Similar to the project above, this study uses eyegaze methods and all-day recording data.Narrative sample analysis in Mandarin-English bilingual children
2022/08 This project aims to develop transcription and scoring protocol for narrative samples from Mandarin-English bilingual children.Additional Information
Speech Language Pathologist, Texas Department of Licensing and Regulations
License number: 120130Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech Language Pathology (CCC-SLP)
Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech Language Pathology (CCC-SLP), American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA) (ASHA #14114264)News Articles
Early-Career Trailblazers in Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology
