Rachel Dudley

Rachel Dudley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California San Diego. She holds a BA in Linguistics from New York University and a PhD from the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on understanding how children develop semantic and pragmatic competence through language acquisition, integrating insights from linguistics, psychology, and philosophy.

Education:

• B.A., Linguistics, New York University
• Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Maryland

Research Interests: Rachel investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying children's acquisition of complex linguistic concepts such as propositional attitudes, presupposition triggers, and thematic relations. Her work employs diverse methodologies including behavioral experiments with children/adults, infant eye-tracking, and corpus analyses of naturalistic speech. She explores how environmental input interacts with innate linguistic capacities to shape developmental trajectories.

Awards: No specific awards listed in provided texts.

Advising & Grants: No student advisees or grant information explicitly mentioned. Previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the Cognitive Development Center (Central European University) and the Institut Jean Nicod (Ecole Normale Supérieure).

Labs/Teams: Active in UC San Diego's Department of Linguistics research community, though no specific lab affiliation listed.