Dhanya Charan, a third-year Cognitive Science and Linguistics & Psychology double major at UCLA, was awarded the Dean’s Prize for Excellence in Research and Creativity for her honors thesis in Linguistics. Her project, “Resyllabification as a Form of Empty Onset Repair by English-Learning Children,” was conducted under the mentorship of Professor Megha Sundara and Professor Victoria Mateu. You can hear her presentation here.
In her project Dhanya investigates how children learning English acquire vowel-initial words, focusing on resyllabification as a strategy to satisfy onset constraints. Analyzing naturalistic speech data, the project contributes to broader theories of phonological development, with implications for understanding cross-linguistic sandhi phenomena like French liaison.
Dhanya has been an active member of many labs at UCLA, including the Language Processing Lab and the Language Acquisition Lab. She plans to pursue a PhD in Cognitive Science, with an interest in cross-linguistic phenomena and language acquisition.
Congratulations Dhanya!
