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 acquire, comprehend and produce language. I am also interested in exploring how insights from cognitive science can inform learning and pedagogy. My research group investigates these areas (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.
I am looking for bright and hard-working graduate/postgraduate/undergraduate students who would like to work in the domains mentioned below:
- Language communication (comprehension/production/dialogue) in Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Austroasiatic languages,
- Interaction of language processing and other domains of cognition (e.g., attention, vision, memory, etc.),
- Cognitive Science and Education
News
- ACCS 2025: Nayana won the Prof. Chandrasekhar Pammi Award for the best oral presentation for her talk 'The Temporal Dynamics of Visual Word Recognition' at ACCS 2025. This award was shared with Naman Payasi who made a presentation titled "Eyes do not lie: Testing whether Eye-tracking can be used to detect Mind-Wandering and Mind-Blanking." (More details)
- I will be giving keynote talks at this year's ACCS and SAFAL
- New Paper: The Role of Orthographic, Lexical, and Syntactic Factors During Reading: The Case of Hindi and Urdu. (More details)
- Multiple research abstracts from our lab accepted at X-PPL, ACCS, and SAFAL. (More details)
- Mudafia Zafar successfully defended her thesis titled "Planning Scope in Production: How Grammar Shapes Incrementality" on 24/07/2025; Congratulations Mudafia!!
- New Paper: IIT Delhi Dialogue Corpus: A Quantitative Analysis of a Spoken Corpus of Hindi. (More details)
- New Paper: Gender Effects on Non-Gendered Pronouns in Hindi and Mandarin Chinese. (More details)
- 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)
Last updated: 20 January, 2026
