2024 Barbara H. and Ben R. Edmondson HHS Faculty Development Award

Written By: Rebecca Hoffa, rhoffa@purdue.edu

Arielle Borovsky

Arielle Borovsky, associate professor in the Purdue University Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, is the 2024 recipient of the Barbara H. and Ben R. Edmondson HHS Faculty Development Award.

Presented each year to a College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) faculty member, the award provides $10,000 to be expended over two years or less for purposes related to the faculty member’s own professional development within any of Purdue’s mission areas: discovery, learning and engagement. Funds for the award come from an endowment established by Purdue alumni Barbara H. (HHS ’64) and Ben R. (AG ’63) Edmondson.

Borovsky will apply the funds toward costs associated with elevating her research, which focuses on the cognitive, linguistic and experiential factors that affect how children learn to acquire and interpret language, to a global level. The award will support two research-intensive networking visits to the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition and Language (BCBL), a leading international research institute in Spain.

At the BCBL, Borovsky plans to broaden her collaboration network and advance her methodological knowledge on how children acquire multiple languages, which is a situation that is becoming increasingly common in the United States and Indiana, from where many of Borovsky’s research populations are derived.

As part of her sabbatical during the spring 2024 semester, Borovsky visited and developed initial connections with the BCBL, where she began to outline plans for future collaborations with researchers in the following research groups: Spoken Language, Infant Cognition and Language, and Computational Neuroscience. With the award, Borovsky will work with these groups on studies and data analyses to better understand language development in multilingual contexts.

From these experiences, Borovsky expects to gain an international research presence, both elevating herself and Purdue as global leaders in the speech, language and hearing sciences field; build a new pipeline for recruiting and mentoring top graduate students; and grow her work to understand language development in new populations.

For more information, please contact Arielle Borovsky or Susie Swithers.

• Arielle Borovsky; associate professor; Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences; aborovsky@purdue.edu.
• Susie Swithers, associate dean for faculty affairs, College of Health and Human Sciences, swithers@purdue.edu.