Psycholinguistics lab

Graduate students: Wasim Odud, Mudafia Zafar, Nayana Raj, Pranab Bagartti

Post-doctoral researchers: Benu Pareek
Undergraduate students: Harsh Jain

Sakshi Bhatia, Stefan Frank, Kumiko Fukumura, Richard Futrell, Ashwini Vaidya, Himanshu Yadav

PhD: Apurva
Post-doctoral researchers: Sakshi Bhatia
Master's students: Himanshu Yadav (JNU), Vishakha Shukla (JNU), Ishita Arun (IIT Gandhinagar)
Undergraduate students: Arpit Agarwal, Abhinav Singh, Poojan Mehta, Kaivalya Swami, Aditya Shete, Niyati Bafna (Ashoka Univ.), Kartik Sharma, Shubham Mittal, Pranay Sinha

Cognitive constraints during sentence comprehension and sentence production: With regard to sentence comprehension, we investigate sentence complexity from two functional perspectives (a) comprehension processes are constrained due to working-memory limitations, (b) a rational processing system will try to minimize the error during comprehension based on prior experience. The former account explains the complexity of a sentence by appealing to the inherent limitations of working memory. In other words, a sentence is complex if it strains the cognitive resources. The latter explains complexity due to lack of prior exposure to a syntactic configurations, i.e., a rare sentence (or a word sequence) is more difficult because the comprehender is not expecting it based on his/her prior knowledge of language use. In this context, we are currently exploring various research questions that are related to topics such as: predictive processing, memory activation, priming processes, etc. We have also begun to investigate similar questions from a production perspective. We are particularly interested in exploring these themes in languages spoken in the
Indian subcontinent.

Investigating rarity of crossing dependencies: Within the broader theme of sentence parsing/processing, we are interested in understanding crossing dependencies. Why/when do dependencies cross? Are sentences with crossing dependencies difficult for humans? Can we arrive at a functional explanation for the existence of such crossing dependencies? We have investigated these questions using corpus-based methods.

Eye-tracking for Indic scripts: We are also interested in understanding the processes that underlie reading. Reading is intimately connected to the comprehension processes discussed earlier. This connection assumes the so-called 'eye-mind hypothesis' which can be summed up as 'the eye is where the mind is'. Reading involves close coordination of visual cognition, eye-movement control and language processing. We have done some initial work on investigating reading in Hindi (Husain et al., 2015) where the role of various word-level factors such as word length, word frequency, bigram frequency, etc as well as sentence-level factors captured by memory/prediction metrics were explored. We are interested in extending this work to investigate reading processes in various Indian languages. Of particular interest is the role of script complexity.

Potsdam-Allahabad Hindi Eyetracking Corpus. [Download] [More details here]

An incremental dependency parser to compute surprisal values for each word in a sentence. Developed by Arpit Agarwal. [Download] [More details here.]

A dependency to phrase structure conversion tool. Developed by Himanshu Yadav. [Download] [More details here.]