Here is good news to share at our end:

May 22, 2026: We are extremely happy to share that an interdisciplinary research proposal for a Centre of Excellence submitted by our team to Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) has been accepted (with an upper ceiling of Rs 15 crores). 

Details of the project are given below:

• Title of the project: Centre of Excellence: Centre for Research and Intervention in Language Performance

• Team: PI: Sudharshana N. P. (Humanities and Social Sciences Department); Co-PIs: Ark Verma (Cognitive Science Department), Arnab Bhattacharya (Computer Science & Engineering Department), Chaithra Puttaswamy (Humanities and Social Sciences Department), Himanshu Yadav (Cognitive Science Department), and Lalit Saraswat (Humanities and Social Sciences Department)

• Aims: Measuring language proficiency in up to 12 Indian languages across various modalities like speaking, listening, reading, and writing; diagnosing speech and communication disorders; developing interventions for effective language teaching-learning; and producing large-scale benchmark datasets for Indian languages.

May 12, 2026: Dr. Ark Verma gave a talk at Samvaad 2026—a workshop organized by the Teaching Learning Unit at IIT Jammu for strengthening effective teaching-learning practices and student engagement. 

April 18, 2026: Many congratulations to Abhishek, Ashna, Suraj and Yamini for poster presentation with full paper acceptance at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2026!🥳

April 8, 2026:  Dr. Ark will serve as a Co-Chair for the 4th Workshop on Experimental and Empirical Methods in Linguistics (EEL 2026). We warmly invite students, researchers, and faculty members to participate in the workshop to be held from July 1-5, 2026 at IIT Kanpur. More details are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/eel26/

March 29, 2026: A warm welcome to Bugatha Prashant Naidu and Navneet Berwal, who have joined our lab as master's students!

February 27, 2026: From Dec 2025 to Feb 2026, Dr. Ark Verma was Visiting Faculty at Indian Institute of Management Indore, teaching Introduction to Psychology. 

February 17, 2026: Congratulations to Debaparna on a successful PhD defense. Wishing her all the best for future!! 💐

January 5, 2026: Congratulations to Anurag on successfully completing his PhD Open Seminar! 💐

December 28, 2025: A warm welcome to Ashna Perveen, who has joined our lab as Research Assistant!

December 22, 2025: Dr. Ark Verma gave a talk titled “Us versus Them: Evidence for Pervasive Ingroup Bias in Social Behavior,” at Indian Institute of Management Indore.

December 14, 2025: Abhishek presented a poster titled, "Media Polarization and Doomscrolling Behavior: Investigation Through the Lens of Ingroup Bias", at the 12th Annual Conference of Cognitive Science (ACCS-12), Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences (CBCS), University of Allahabad.

December 8, 2025: Huge congratulations to Niket, who will be starting his PhD with Dr. Nils B. Kroemer at the University of Tübingen! Niket was a research associate and completed his masters thesis with us. Best wishes to him! 💐👏👏

November 28, 2025: Congrats to Abhishek on a successful PhD defense. Best wishes for the next chapter! 💐🎓🎉

November 27, 2025: Congratulations to Irfan on successfully completing his PhD Open Seminar! 💐👏

November 25, 2025: Congratulations to Firdous on successfully defending his PhD thesis! Firdous is the first PhD student to graduate from our lab. Wishing him all the best in his future endeavors! 🎉💐🎓

November 17, 2025: Suraj gave a talk titled, "Spatial attention in visual word processing: Re-attending to the role of orthography", at the South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL' 2025), University of Colorado Boulder! Congratulations!🎉

October 1, 2025: Congratulations to Neetu for getting appointed as Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Sciences, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES), Dehradun! 🎉💐

September 5, 2025: Dr. Ark Verma received Excellence in Teaching Award at IIT Kanpur on the occasion of Teachers' day! 💐🥳

September 3, 2025: Irfan gave a talk titled Leveraging Self-Prioritization to Enhance Performance in Dynamic Working Memory Tasks at conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP '25), Sheffield. Congratulations! 🎉💐

August 16, 2025: Dr. Ark Verma delivered a lecture titled, "Cognitive Aspects of Teaching", at the Teaching Assistant and Staff Workshop organized by Center for Educational Research and Teaching Excellence at IIT Kanpur.

August 7, 2025: Many congratulations to Abhishek for being granted the Fellowship for Academic and Research Excellence (FARE) by IIT Kanpur!🎉💐

July 17, 2025: Dr. Ark Verma delivered the keynote address as Chief Guest during the orientation program at Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University, Kanpur 

June 27, 2025: Congratulations to Vivek on successfully completing his PhD Open Seminar! 💐

June 25, 2025: Dr. Ark Verma gave a talk titled "In Search of Universal Models of Reading: Why research in Indian Languages is Required?", at 3rd Workshop on Experimental and Empirical Methods in Linguistics (EEL'25), IIT Kanpur.

May 20, 2025: Congratulations to Neetu for defending her MS-R Thesis titled, "Investigating Perceptual Boundaries of Self-prioritization Effect in the Abstract Shape Paradigm Using Priming Studies".🎉💐🥳  

March 29, 2025: Congratulations to Debaparna for starting her new position as Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Thapar University, Patiala! 🎉💐

February 27-28, 2025: Anurag gave a talk titled "Flexibility in letter position encoding in Hindi" at the Association for reading and Writing in Asia Conference (ARWA 2025), held at Cebu, Philippines. Congrats!💐🎉

February 18, 2025: Congratulations to Firdous on successfully completing his PhD Open Seminar! 💐

February 15–16, 2025: Two-day Bhartiya Bhasha Parivar Symposium was organized by Dr. Ark Verma and Dr. Himanshu Yadav, in collaboration with Bhartiya Bhasha Samiti, Ministry of Education, Government of India.The symposium provided a unique platform for experts across disciplines to explore the complexities of Indian languages, their cognitive processing, and their significance in artificial intelligence and education.

February 12, 2025: Congratulations to Abhishek on successfully completing his PhD Open Seminar! 💐🎉

February 10, 2025: A warm welcome to Yamini Kathuria who has joined our lab as master's student!

December 13 - 15, 2024: Our lab members presented research posters and gave talks during 11th Annual Conference of Cognitive Science (ACCS-XI) held at IIT Bombay:

Talks and the presenters*:

• ShabdGyaan: A pilot study precursor to mega-study on word recognition, individual differences and vocabulary size estimation by Singh, Ansh; Agrawal, Niket*; Verma, Ark

• Investigating perceptual boundaries of Self-Prioritization effect in Abstract Shape Paradigm using Priming effect by Singh, Neetu *; Ahmad, Irfan; Verma, Ark 

Posters' title and presenters*:

• Emotions and Driving: Effect of Emotions on Speed During Sudden Pedestrian Crossing Event by Debaparna

• The Dichotomy of Bias Behavior: Inhibition of Automaticity in In-group Bias for Deliberative Decisions by Abhishek 

• Self-prioritization modulates the multiple object tracking performance by Irfan

• Weighted LD1NN Algorithm for Detecting Bias in Lexical Decision Experiments for Abugida Systems and Indian Languages. Ansh Singh*, Niket Agrawal and Ark Verma

Congratulations to everyone! 🎉

December 5-7, 2024:  Vivek gave an oral presentation titled, "New social media-based corpora for Hindi with better frequency estimates",  at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Asia (AMLaP) 2024 conference at National University of Singapore. Congratulations! 💐

May 23, 2023: English Reading Online (ENRO) collaborative project with Noam Siegelman and Victor Kuperman is now published in Language Learning. It contains N>7000 first- and second-language speakers.

May 8, 2023: Many Congratulations to Anjoom for securing 1000 $ Diversity & Inclusion Award at Cog Sci 2023.🎉

April 26, 2023: Congratulations to Irfan for a nicely done State of the Art Seminar (SOTA)!🎉

December 23, 2022: Many many congratulations to Moulshree! She will pusure PhD at Donders Centre, Radboud University with Kristin Lemhöfer.🎉🥳  

Recently, we published "Shabd: A psycholinguistic database for Hindi" in the journal Behavior Research Methods. Shabd is the first psycholinguistic database for Hindi language. This database is composed of 1.4 billion word tokens and 2.3 million word types. We provide information about word frequency, word length (akshara, matra, phoneme, syllable), part-of-speech tags (with frequency), contextual diversity etc. 

The entire database is freely available for use by researchers who may be interested in using Hindi words in their research. You may be able to access the full paper on the publications page on this website.

We also published another paper titled, "Yes! I love my mother as much as myself: Self- and Mother-Association Effects in an Indian Sample" in the journal Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. In this paper, we demonstrate that the so-called self-prioritization effect indeed varies across cultures. To begin with, we demonstrated that in Indian participants, as with Chinese (and other oriental cultures) participants do not show a preferential processing for self- relative to mother; but show advantages in processing relative to the friend. Moreover, we demonstrate that the processing for the self-associated stimuli gets modulated in a dynamic context and the nature of modulation depends upon the label in contrast, in a given situation. You may be able to access the full paper on the publications page on this website.