Bhuvana Narasimhan

About

Bhuvana Narasimhan is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder and serves as the Director of the Language, Development, and Cognition Lab. Her research focuses on corpus-based and experimental studies in language acquisition, linguistics, and the language-cognition interface. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Boston University in 1998, where she was supervised by Catherine O'Connor, Jean Berko Gleason, and Ray Jackendoff. Following her doctoral studies, she conducted postdoctoral research at Bell Labs, contributing to the development of a Hindi text-to-speech synthesis system. She also held a position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands as a postdoctoral fellow and scientific staff member in the Language Acquisition group. Since 2008, she has been a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is also a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Chemistry
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Thinking-for-speaking in early and late bilinguals

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2013-05-30 · 74 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  When speakers describe motion events using different languages, they subsequently classify those events in language-specific ways (Gennari, Sloman, Malt & Fitch, 2002). Here we ask if bilingual speakers flexibly shift their event classification preferences based on the language in which they verbally encode those events. English–Spanish bilinguals and monolingual controls described motion events in either Spanish or English. Subsequently they judged the similarity of the motion events in a t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Hindi/Urdu Treebank Project

  2017-01-01 · 35 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• 8 Granularity in the cross‐linguistic encoding of motion and location

  2012-11-29 · 29 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter explores three ways in which the notion of ‘granularity’ emerges from the study of cross-linguistic event semantics. The first interpretation of granularity has to do with event segmentation for linguistic expressions. Depending on the language and cultural setting in which an event is encoded, humans vary in where they place event boundaries at the clausal level. Second, within the set boundaries of a ‘single event’ in time, there are many elements that could all receive e…

  PublisherDOI

• 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 · 24 citations

  This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man, across three age groups (5-6 years, 9-10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the man; Someone made the man laugh; Someone broke the…

  PublisherDOI

• Satellite- vs. Verb-Framing Underpredicts Nonverbal Motion Categorization: Insights from a Large Language Sample and Simulations

  Cognitive Semantics · 2017-02-28 · 21 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Is motion cognition influenced by the large-scale typological patterns proposed in Talmy’s (2000) two-way distinction between verb-framed (V) and satellite-framed (S) languages? Previous studies investigating this question have been limited to comparing two or three languages at a time and have come to conflicting results. We present the largest cross-linguistic study on this question to date, drawing on data from nineteen genealogically diverse languages, all investigated in the same behavioral…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Anetta Kopecka

  Histoire des Théories Linguistiques

  22 shared

• Melissa Bowerman

  20 shared

• Marianne Gullberg

  Lund University

  19 shared

• Penelope Brown

  Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

  17 shared

• Sonja Eisenbeiß

  University of Cologne

  17 shared

• Christine Dimroth

  15 shared

• Asifa Majid

  University of Oxford

  11 shared

• Dan I. Slobin

  University of California, Berkeley

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Boston University

  1998

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science

Similar researchers at University of Colorado Boulder

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• Alexis Palmerh-21
• Chase Wesley Raymondh-21