I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, India. I am associated with the Cognitive Science program at IIT Delhi.
My research is situated in the areas of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. I am interested in how humans comprehend and produce language. My research group investigates
sentence comprehension and production (with a special focus on South-Asian languages) using behavioral, corpus-based as well as computational methods.
To know more about my research group see here. To know more about my group's recent research work see here.
At IIT Delhi I teach courses to undergraduates and postgraduates in the areas of linguistics, cognitive science, statistics, and psycholinguistics; for more details see here.
News
- EEL 2025: The 3rd edition of the Workshop on Experimental and Empirical Methods in Linguistics will happen at IIT Kanpur from June 25-29, 2025. Application still open!!
- CogSci 2025: Nayana's and Pranab's research work accepted at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society; (More details)
- New Paper: The effect of similarity-based interference on bottom-up and top-down processing in verb-final languages: Evidence from Hindi. (More details)
- SAFAL 2024: Nayana, Pranab, and Gayatri presented their research work at SAFAL 2024. (More details)
- New Paper: Revisiting processing complexity of nested and cross-serial dependencies. (More details)
- Sept 2024: I gave a keynote talk at X-PPL 2024 held at University of Zurich. Talk title: Investigating the Three Ps of Processing in SOV Languages: Prediction, Priming and Production. (Abstract)
- June 2024: I gave a talk at IASNLP held at IIIT Hyderabad. Talk title: Neural language models as cognitive models. (Abstract)
- HSP 2024: Mudafia won the Gibson-Fedorenko 2024 HSP young scholar's award for her talk "The Role of Locality and Formulation Ease during Sentence Production"
at HSP2024. The prize honours 2 young scholar presentations and comes with a monetary award of $1000. She will be presented with the award at HSP2025.
- AMLaP and X-PPL 2024: Nayana's and Pranab's abstracts accepted at AMLaP 2024 and at X-PPL 2024. (More details)
- New Paper: Do working memory constraints influence prediction in verb-final languages? (More details)
- New Paper: Do speakers minimize dependency length during naturalistic dialogue? (More details)
- HSP 2024: Mudafia Zafar's abstract titled "The Role of Locality and Formulation Ease during Sentence Production" accepted as podium presentation at HSP2024.
- Feb 2024: I gave a talk at the Saarland University (Information Density and Linguistic Encoding colloquium) and at the Institute of Linguistics, Stuttgart University.
Talk title: Limits to prediction during sentence comprehension in SOV languages. (Abstract)
Last updated: 6 April, 2025
