[1] Naigles has served as Vice President of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), and as Conference Liaison to the 2027 Congress.

She defended her dissertation on "Syntactic bootstrapping as a procedure for verb learning" in 1988 under the guidance of Lila Gleitman.

At Yale, Naigles was the advisor of the Philosophy track of undergraduate Psychology major, Trumbull College, and Mellon Minority Student Research Program.

[1] Naigles has been a guest columnist of the newsletter CCSTSG (Central Connecticut Star Trek Support Group)[9] Enterprises.

[8] In experiments 1 and 2, she asked children to use toys to convey the meanings of verbs in grammatically correct and incorrect sentences.

[7] Naigles has conducted research on the phenomenon of syntactic bootstrapping in different languages, including French, Mandarin Chinese,[11] Turkish,[12] Korean, Spanish, and Japanese.

Naigles and her colleagues demonstrated that while pronoun reversals may be more common in children with autism, they were actually extremely rare in regular conversations, and were related to aspects of their social development.

She and her colleague Bede Agocha were awarded a UConn grant in 2020 to support work on anti-racist teaching.