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

Professional Preparation

PhD - Hearing and Speech Sciences
Vanderbilt University

MS - Interdisciplinary Science in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities
Vanderbilt University

BS - Communication Sciences and Disorders; Linguistics
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

Su, P. L., Rojas, R., & Iglesias, A. (2022). Dual language profiles in Spanish-Speaking English Learners. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 65(7), 2608-2628.

2022 - publications

Sheng, L., Wang, D., Walsh, C., Heisler, L., Li, X., & Su, P. L. (2021). The bilingual home language boost through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology, 12(July), 1-10.

2021 - publications

Su, P. L., Rogers, S. J., Estes, A., & Yoder, P. (2020). The role of early social motivation in explaining variability in functional language in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 25(1), 244-257.

2020 - publications

Koegel, L. K., Bryan, K. M., Su, P. L., Vaidya, M., & Camarata, S. (2020). Definitions of nonverbal and minimally verbal in research for Autism: A systematic review of the literature. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50(8), 2957-2972.

2020 - publications

Su, P. L., Castle, G., & Camarata, S. M. (2019). Cross-modal generalization of receptive and expressive vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 4, 1-18.

2019 - publications

Su, P. L., & Roberts, M. Y. (2019). Quantity and quality of parental utterances and responses to children with hearing loss prior to cochlear implant. Journal of Early Intervention, 41(4), 366-387.

2019 - publications

Appointments

Assistant Professor
University of Texas at Dallas [2022–Present]

Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Delaware [2020–2022]

Clinical Fellow in Speech-Language Pathology
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.