Umay Suanda

Associate Professor

Psychological Sciences

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Education

Ph.D., 2012. Emory University

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Research Interests

Early communication and language development, the input and the learning environment, the dynamics of early social interactions, statistical learning, mechanisms of word learning.

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Research Synopsis

The typical child lives in a sea of data: countless words, numerous objects, and many social interactions. Despite what seems like a daunting flood of information, children learn quickly and efficiently about their world. I am interested in the processes that underlie this prodigious learning. Although I have broad research interests in early cognitive, social and language development, the focus of much of my work is around how infants, toddlers, and young children learn words.

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Teaching

Undergraduate

• General Psychology I (PSYC 1100)
• Current Directions in Developmental Psychology (PSYC 3470)

Graduate

• Cognitive Development Graduate Seminar (PSYC 5420)

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Publications

Recent

Schoener, N., Johnson, S., & Suanda, S. H. (2025). Learning partial word meanings from referentially ambiguous naming events. Cognitive Science, 49, Article e70104

Mankovich, A., Macdonald, S., Kinnie, B., Johnson, S.C., & Suanda, S. H. (2025) Information sources for word meaning in children’s picture books. Journal of Cognition and Development, 26, 90-110.

Boskovic, K., & Suanda, S. H. (2023). Laying the foundation: Extracting partial meanings of hard nouns via observational contexts. In M. Goldwater, F. Anggoro, B. Hayes, & D. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Representative

Suanda, S. H., Barnhart, M., Smith, L. B., & Yu, C. (2019). The Signal in the noise: The visual ecology of parents’ object naming. Infancy, 24, 455-476.

Yu, C., Suanda, S. H., & Smith, L. B. (2019). Infant sustained attention but not joint attention to objects at 9 months predicts vocabulary at 12 and 15 months. Developmental Science, 22: e12735

Suanda, S.H., Mugwanya, N., & Namy, L.L. (2014). Cross-situational statistical word learning in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 126, 395-411.

Smith, L.B., Suanda, S.H., & Yu, C. (2014). The unrealized promise of infant statistical word-referent learning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 251-258.