Dr Madhavilatha Maganti has a background in Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Science with a concentration in Infancy and Early Childhood Development. Her work integrates behavioural and computational approaches to understand the cognitive mechanisms that underlie attentional processes and language learning in infants and children contributing to embodied models of cognition. She uses behavioural methodologies like naturalistic observations and eye tracking for studying the development of multimodal attentional processes in high/low-risk infants and intersensory origins of word- mapping. Her work on embodied connections in early verb learning, involves studying the associations between body parts and actions in Telugu and Hindi children as well as native Tamil speakers. She has also built a corpus of early verbs in Telugu and collected speech samples from mother-child conversations for computational analysis of speech during infancy. Further, her lab is involved in collecting data from parent-child conversations between 6 to 12 years, to annotate back channelling behaviours for modelling development of turn-taking and contingency using deep-learning. In addition, she examines narrative macrostructure in Hindi-English bilingual children using Multilingual Assessment of Narratives, a tool for assessment of language in children. To extend her work further and delve deeper into speech production, she is collaborating in the Mind 2 Brain project to identify neurophysiological signatures of phonological and phonetic processing in Hindi and French. Her work on early language acquisition and developmental linguistics aims to bridge the gap between linguistic theory and an understanding of how children acquire speech and language in a multilingual Indian context.

Furthermore, her translation research is focused on efforts to mitigate the effects of risks arising from early adversity. She is also involved in the designing, implementation and assessment of intervention outcomes by engaging in scalable community-based ECD interventions designed to promote neurodevelopmental outcomes in infants and children. Eventually, the goal is to harness emerging empirical insights from developmental science to support translational efforts and promote evidence-based practices.