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Narasimhan, Bhuvana

Professor

Positions

• Professor, Linguistics

Research Areas

• Language Acquisition and Development
• Linguistics/Philology
• Psycholinguistics

Research

research overview

• Dr.Narasimhan's research uses psycholinguistic experiments and statistical analysis of corpora to investigate the relationship between language and cognition, the acquisition of semantic and discourse-pragmatics in children acquiring a first language, and the crosslinguistic encoding of meaning and argument structure, with a focus on Hindi and Tamil.

keywords

• meaning and argument structure, language-cognition relationship, developmental psycholinguistics, children's semantic and pragmatic development, acquisition of verb meaning, argument realization, information structure

Publications

selected publications

• book

  • The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian Languages 2022
    
  • The Linguistic Encoding of Multiple-participant Events 2007

• chapter

  • The Influence of Visual, Auditory, and Linguistic Cues On Children’s Novel Verb Generalization. 2017
  • The Hindi/Urdu Treebank Project 2017
    
  • The Hindi/Urdu Treebank Project.  659-697. 2017
    
  • Cognitive Linguistics 2016
    
  • Syntax and Semantics.  501-630. 2016
    
  Accessibility and Linear Order in Phrasal Conjuncts.  211-234. 2015
  
  “Verb representation and thinking-for-speaking effects in Spanish-English bilinguals 2015
  Patterns of prohibitions in parent-child discourse 2014
  Ergative case-marking in Hindi child-caregiver speech.  209-238. 2013
  “Towards an experimental functionalist linguistics: Production.” 2013
  Granularity in the crosslinguistic encoding of motion and location.  134-148. 2012
  The acquisition of information structure 2012
  
  Putting and Taking in Tamil and Hindi.  Typological Studies in Language. 201-230. 2012
  Putting and taking events A crosslinguistic perspective.  Typological Studies in Language. 1-18. 2012
  “Encoding placement events in Hindi and Tamil.”.  Ed. Narasimhan, Bhuvana .  2012
  Putting Things in Places: Developmental Consequences of Linguistic Typology 2010
  Getting the INSIDE Story Learning to Express Containment in Tzeltal and Hindi.  97-130. 2009
  
  Ergative case-marking in Hindi 2007
  
  Interim solutions: The acquisition of early constructions in; Hindi 2006
  Differential case-marking in Hindi 2005
  ... more

• conference proceeding

  • Children’s use of prosody and word order to indicate information status in English phrasal conjuncts 2018
  • Developmental Changes in Spatial Semantic Categories in English.  586-597. 2018
  • Information Structure and Ordering Preferences in Child and; Adult Speech in English.  131-139. 2018
  • Semantic roles for nominal predicates: Building a lexical resource 2013
  • Empty Argument Insertion in the Hindi PropBank.  1522-1526. 2012
  Analysis of the hindi proposition bank using dependency structure.  21-29. 2011
  Empty Categories in a Hindi Treebank.  1863-1870. 2010
  Accessibility and Topicality in Children's Use of Word Order.  Proceedings of the ... Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston University Conference on Language Development. 133-138. 2008
  ... more

• journal article

  • Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: The First Truly Global International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021.  Journal of Cognition and Development. 242-260. 2024
    
  • Children learn ergative case marking in Hindi using statistical preemption and clause-level semantics (intentionality): evidence from acceptability judgment and elicited production studies with children and adults.  Open Research Europe. 49-49. 2023
  • A proposal for research on the acquisition of prosodic focus marking in diverse languages: A response to Kidd and Garcia (2022).  First Language. 745-750. 2022
  • The Crosslinguistic Acquisition of Sentence Structure: Computational Modeling and Grammaticality Judgments from Adult and Child Speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'.  Cognition. 1-44. 2020
  • The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'.  Cognition. 2020
    
  Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese.  Languages. 2020
  Linguistic Relativity: Evidence across Languages and Cognitive Domains. Application of Cognitive Linguistics.  Lingua. 78-85. 2018
  
  Special Collection in Linguistics Vanguard: "The acquisition of information structure".  Linguistics Vanguard. 2018
  The inflluence of discourse context on children's ordering of "new" and "old" information.  Linguistics Vanguard. 2018
  
  Multimodal Cue Competition in Adults’ Novel Verb Generalization.  Languages. 2-2. 2017
  
  Satellite- vs. Verb-Framing Underpredicts Nonverbal Motion Categorization: Insights from a Large Language Sample and Simulations.  Cognitive Semantics. 36-61. 2017
  
  Thinking- for- speaking in early and late bilinguals*.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 139-152. 2014
  "Accessibility and topicality in children’s use of word order.".  312-323. 2012
  The Development of Linear Ordering Preferences in Child Language: The Influence of Accessibility and Topicality.  Language Acquisition: a journal of developmental linguistics. 312-323. 2012
  The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch.  Journal of Child Language. 504-532. 2011
  
  What gestures reveal about how semantic distinctions develop in Dutch children's placement verbs.  Cognitive Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of cognitive science. 239-262. 2010
  Word order and information status in child language.  Cognition. 317-329. 2008
  “Two's company, more is a crowd”: the linguistic encoding of multiple-participant events.  Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences. 2007
  
  Cutting, breaking, and tearing verbs in Hindi and Tamil.  Cognitive Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of cognitive science. 2007
  Perspective-shifts in event descriptions in Tamil child language.  Journal of Child Language. 99-124. 2006
  Splitting the notion of ‘agent’: case-marking in early child Hindi.  Journal of Child Language. 787-803. 2005
  Argument realization in Hindi caregiver–child discourse.  Journal of Pragmatics. 461-495. 2005
  Schwa-Deletion in Hindi Text-to-Speech Synthesis.  International Journal of Speech Technology. 319-333. 2004
  Motion events and the lexicon: a case study of Hindi.  Lingua. 123-160. 2003
  The origins of grammar Evidence from eariy language comprehension. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. PP. 239..  Applied Psycholinguistics. 513-515. 1998
  A Lexical Semantic Explanation for ‘Quirky’ Case Marking in Hindi.  Studia Linguistica: a journal of general linguistics. 48-76. 1998
  Family talk about talk: Mothers lead the way.  Discourse Processes. 201-218. 1995
  Ways of communicating: The Darwin College Lectures. D. H. Mellor (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. vi + 165..  Applied Psycholinguistics. 251-256. 1993
  ... more

editor of

• chapter

  • “Encoding placement events in Hindi and Tamil.” 2012

• journal article

  • Special Collection in Linguistics Vanguard: "The acquisition of information structure".  Linguistics Vanguard. 2018

Teaching

courses taught

• LING 3430 - Semantics
  Primary Instructor - Spring 2018 / Fall 2019 / Spring 2021 / Spring 2022 / Spring 2023 / Spring 2024 / Fall 2024
  Theoretical and practical study of meaning in natural language. Considers both semantic theories and semantic phenomena from diverse languages.
• LING 4100 - Perspectives on Language
  Primary Instructor - Spring 2019 / Spring 2024
  Provides extended critical examination of a few selected issues, chosen each term for their general interest and relevance, e.g., the relation between language and thought, or human language vs. animal languages, and computer languages. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours, provided topics vary. Recommended prerequisite: LING 2000.
• LING 4220 - Language and Mind
  Primary Instructor - Fall 2018 / Fall 2022
  Studies topics such a speech perception, word recognition, sentence comprehension, language acquisition, bilingualism, reading and writing. Examines the role of language as a product and producer of the mind, studying interactions between language and cognition from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will become familiar with the methods of psycholinguistics and design and conduct a psycholinguistic experiment on their own. Recommended prerequisites: PSYC 1001 and LING 2000. Same as PSYC 4220.
• LING 4830 - Honors Thesis
  Primary Instructor - Spring 2018 / Fall 2024
  Required for students who elect departmental honors. Students write an honors thesis based on independent research under the direction of a faculty member. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours.
• LING 5300 - Research in Psycholinguistics
  Primary Instructor - Fall 2018 / Spring 2024
  Explores research topics and methods in psycholinguistics selected from areas such as language production and comprehension, language and cognition, and language acquisition. Recommended prerequisite: at least one graduate-level course in LING, PSYC or CSCI.
LING 5430 - Semantics and Pragmatics
Primary Instructor - Spring 2020 / Spring 2022
Explores fundamental concepts of semantics and pragmatics, including theories of communication and meaning, representation, conversational implications, speech acts, and discourse structure. Recommended prerequisite: LING 5420.
LING 5800 - Open Topics in Linguistics
Primary Instructor - Spring 2019
Various topics not normally covered in the curriculum. Offered intermittently depending on student demand and availability of instructors. Contact the department office for information. May be repeated up to 9 credit hours.
LING 6560 - Language Acquisition
Primary Instructor - Spring 2018
Theories and research methods in first-language acquisition of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Recommended prerequisites: LING 5410 and LING 5420 and LING 5430.
LING 6950 - Master's Thesis
Primary Instructor - Fall 2020 / Spring 2021

LING 7800 - Open Topics in Linguistics
Primary Instructor - Fall 2019
Various topics not normally covered in the curriculum; offered intermittently depending on student demand and availability of instructors. Contact the department office for information.
PSYC 4220 - Language and Mind
Primary Instructor - Fall 2018 / Fall 2022
Studies topics such a speech perception, word recognition, sentence comprehension, language acquisition, bilingualism, reading and writing. Examines the role of language as a product and producer of the mind, studying interactions between language and cognition from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will become familiar with the methods of psycholinguistics and design and conduct a psycholinguistic experiment on their own. Recommended prerequisites: PSYC 1001 and LING 2000. Same as LING 4220.
... more

Background

education and training

• Ph.D., Boston University 1998
• B.A., Delhi University (India) 1988

awards and honors

• Provost's Faculty Achievement Award for Tenured Faculty, conferred by Academic Affairs, 2019

International Activities

geographic focus

• http://dbpedia.org/page/Hong_Kong  Geographic Region
• Argentina  Country
• Australia  Country
• Europe  Continent
• Germany  Country
India  Country
Israel  Country
Japan  Country
Netherlands  Country
United Kingdom  Country
... more

Other Profiles

ORCID iD

• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1559-9661

ResearchGate

• https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bhuvana_Narasimhan

Academia.edu

• http://colorado.academia.edu/BhuvanaNarasimhan