Dr. Childers joined the Trinity faculty in 2000, following a post-doctoral fellowship at Emory University. The main focus of her research is to examine children's early verb learning, both in laboratory studies and in naturalistic contexts across cultures. Her current research uses behavioral enactment, video and eye tracking procedures to test how a specific mental process, the comparison of events, may be used by children when deducing the meaning of new verbs.
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Dr. Childers teaches courses that explore various topics in development. Key topics of interest are how human infants compare to non-human primates in their cognitive abilities, how development is influenced by and unfolds across cultures, and recently, explorations of developmental disabilities.