Research interests: Psycholinguistics, First language acquisition, Learning theory, Differences between first and second language learning, Cognitive Science.

Prof. Arnon is a developmental psychologist, linguist, and cognitive scientist (PhD, Stanford, 2011). She is a Full Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University, currently a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on how children learn language, why they do so better than adults, and how studying language learning can help us understand how human language evolved to begin with. Prof. Arnon has worked extensively on first language learning, developing a novel framework for understanding why children are better language learners than adults, with applied implications for human and machine learning (The Starting Big Approach, see Arnon, 2021). Her current projects ask how learning and learnability pressures shape language structure and language evolution, using findings from child language learning to inform research on language evolution and animal communication. Doing so creates new ways of explaining how children learn language, why languages look the way they do, and how similar they are to other communication systems in nature.