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

• 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 · 2023-09-13

  articleOpen access

  <ns3:p><ns3:bold>Background:</ns3:bold> A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields <ns3:italic>cats, dogs</ns3:italic>, etc, with exceptions <ns3:italic>feet</ns3:italic> and <ns3:italic>men</ns3:italic>). We investigated this question for Hindi ergative <ns3:italic>ne</ns3:italic> marking; another semi-regular but exception-filled system. Generally, in the past tense, the subject of two-participant transitive verbs (e.g., <ns3:italic>Ram broke the cup</ns3:italic>) is marked with <ns3:italic>ne</ns3:italic>, but there are exceptions. How, then, do children learn when <ns3:italic>ne</ns3:italic> marking is required, when it is optional, and when it is ungrammatical?</ns3:p><ns3:p> <ns3:bold>Methods:</ns3:bold> We conducted two studies using (a) acceptability judgment and (b) elicited production methods with children (aged 4-5, 5-6 and 9-10 years) and adults.</ns3:p><ns3:p> <ns3:bold>Results:</ns3:bold> All age groups showed effects of <ns3:italic>statistical preemption</ns3:italic>: the greater the frequency with which a particular verb appears with versus without <ns3:italic>ne</ns3:italic> marking on the subject – relative to other verbs – the greater the extent to which participants (a) accepted and (b) produced <ns3:italic>ne</ns3:italic> over zero-marked subjects. Both children and adults also showed effects of clause-level semantics, showing greater acceptance of <ns3:italic>ne</ns3:italic> over zero-marked subjects for intentional than unintentional actions. Some evidence of semantic effects at the level of the verb was observed in the elicited production task for children and the judgment task for adults.</ns3:p><ns3:p> <ns3:bold>Conclusions:</ns3:bold> participants mainly learn ergative marking on an input-based verb-by-verb basis (i.e., via statistical preemption; verb-level semantics), but are also sensitive to clause-level semantic considerations (i.e., the intentionality of the action). These findings add to a growing body of work which suggests that children learn semi-regular, exception-filled systems using both statistics and semantics.</ns3:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: The First Truly Global International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021

  Journal of Cognition and Development · 2023-07-28 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to work on language development, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition, a free 5-day virtual school for early career researchers. In this paper, we describe the school, our experience organizing it, and lessons learned. The school had a diverse organizer team, composed of 26 researchers (17 from under represented areas: Subsaharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Central and South America); and a diverse volunteer team, with a total of 95 volunteers from 35 different countries, nearly half from under represented areas. This helped world-wide Page 5 of 5 promotion of the school, leading to 958 registrations from 88 different countries, with 300 registrants (based in 63 countries, 80% from under represented areas) selected to participate in the synchronous aspects of the event. The school employed asynchronous (pre-recorded lectures, which were close-captioned) and synchronous elements (e.g., discussions to place the recorded lectures into participants' context; networking events) across three time zones. A post-school questionnaire revealed that 99% of participants enjoyed taking part in the school. Not with standing these positive quantitative outcomes, qualitative comments suggested we fell short in several areas, including the geographic diversity among lecturers and greater customization of contents to the participants’ contexts. Although much remains to be done to promote inclusivity in linguistic research, we hope our school will contribute to empowering researchers to investigate and publish on language acquisition in their home languages, to eventually result in more representative theories and empirical generalizations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: First Truly Global International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021

  2023-01-13 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access

  A survey of diversity in leading language acquisition journals revealed that only 2% of the 7,000+ languages of the world are represented. With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to this literature, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/). /L+/ was a free 5-day virtual school that facilitated the interchange of expertise among early career researchers about all levels of language development in monolingual and multilingual contexts. Our paper provides an overview of organizing /L+/, the measures we took to ensure inclusivity, and qualitative and quantitative analyses of attendees' experiences. We asked for volunteers through the LangVIEW consortium resulting in a diverse organization team from under-represented areas: Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. To promote inclusivity, we (1) employed asynchronous and synchronous elements across three time zones; (2) provided closed captions for lectures and international sign interpretation for live sessions; (3) issued a code of conduct. For each time zone, an algorithm selected 120 participants (80% from traditionally under-represented regions) and 61 countries were represented. A post-school questionnaire revealed that 99% of attendees enjoyed taking part in /L+/. However, qualitative comments suggested that there were issues in duration, contents and scheduling. Although much remains to be done to promote inclusivity in linguistic research, we hope our school will contribute to empowering researchers to investigate and publish on language acquisition in their home languages.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 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 · 2023-03-29

  articleOpen access

  <ns7:p> <ns7:bold>Background:</ns7:bold> A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields <ns7:italic>cats, dogs</ns7:italic> , etc, with exceptions <ns7:italic>feet</ns7:italic> and <ns7:italic>men</ns7:italic> ). We investigated this question for Hindi ergative <ns7:italic>ne</ns7:italic> marking; another semi-regular but exception-filled system. Generally, in the past tense, the subject of two-participant transitive verbs (e.g., <ns7:italic>Ram broke the cup</ns7:italic> ) is marked with <ns7:italic>ne</ns7:italic> , but there are exceptions. How, then, do children learn when <ns7:italic>ne</ns7:italic> marking is required, when it is optional, and when it is ungrammatical? </ns7:p> <ns7:p> <ns7:bold>Methods:</ns7:bold> We conducted two studies using (a) acceptability judgment and (b) elicited production methods with children (aged 4-5, 5-6 and 9-10 years) and adults. </ns7:p> <ns7:p> <ns7:bold>Results:</ns7:bold> All age groups showed effects of <ns7:italic>statistical preemption</ns7:italic> : the greater the frequency with which a particular verb appears with versus without <ns7:italic>ne</ns7:italic> marking on the subject – relative to other verbs – the greater the extent to which participants (a) accepted and (b) produced <ns7:italic>ne</ns7:italic> over zero-marked subjects. Both children and adults also showed effects of clause-level semantics, showing greater acceptance of <ns7:italic>ne</ns7:italic> over zero-marked subjects for intentional than unintentional actions. Some evidence of semantic effects at the level of the verb was observed in the elicited production task for children and the judgment task for adults. </ns7:p> <ns7:p> <ns7:bold>Conclusions:</ns7:bold> participants mainly learn ergative marking on an input-based verb-by-verb basis (i.e., via statistical preemption; verb-level semantics), but are also sensitive to clause-level semantic considerations (i.e., the intentionality of the action). These findings add to a growing body of work which suggests that children learn semi-regular, exception-filled systems using both statistics and semantics. </ns7:p>

  PublisherDOI

• A proposal for research on the acquisition of prosodic focus marking in diverse languages: A response to Kidd and Garcia (2022)

  First Language · 2022-07-07 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Kidd and Garcia demonstrate a dire lack of diversity in language acquisition research. We present a concrete proposal to improve language and area coverage in the field. Our approach outlines key questions in an understudied area, that is, prosody, methods for collecting and analyzing data, resources for training and tools, and a means to foster research collaboration and publication of crosslinguistic findings. The proposal, if implemented on a publicly accessible website, will facilitate crosslinguistic research on prosody acquisition.

  PublisherDOI

• Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’

  Open Research Europe · 2022 · 6 citations

  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  ). Together with previous findings, the present study demonstrates that a simple learning model can explain (a) adults' continuous judgment data, (b) children's binary judgment data and (c) children's production data (with no training of these datasets), and therefore constitutes a plausible mechanistic account of the acquisition of verbs' argument structure restrictions.

  PublisherDOI

• 文構造の言語学的獲得:英語,日本,ヒンディ,ヘブライおよびK’icheの成人および子供話者からのコンピュータモデリングおよび文法性判断【JST・京大機械翻訳】

  2020-01-01

  article
  Publisher

• Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

  Languages · 2020 · 5 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 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

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Linguistics

  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 truck; ?Someone made the truck break). The verb-semantics hypothesis predicts that, for all languages, by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by the extent to which the causing and caused event (e.g., amusing and laughing) merge conceptually into a single event (as rated by separate groups of adult participants). The entrenchment and preemption hypotheses predict, for all languages, that by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by, respectively, the verb's relative overall frequency, and frequency in nearly-synonymous constructions (e.g., X made Y laugh for *Someone laughed the man). Analysis using mixed effects models revealed that entrenchment/preemption effects (which could not be distinguished due to collinearity) were observed for all age groups and all languages except K'iche', which suffered from a thin corpus and showed only preemption sporadically. All languages showed effects of event-merge semantics, except K'iche' which showed only effects of supplementary semantic predictors. We end by presenting a computational model which successfully simulates this pattern of results in a single discriminative-learning mechanism, achieving by-verb correlations of around r = 0.75 with human judgment data.

  PublisherDOI

• Children’s use of prosody and word order to indicate information status in English noun phrase conjuncts

  Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2018-03-03 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Our study investigates the influence of information status on word order and prosody in children and adults. Using an elicited production task, we examine the ordering and intonation of noun phrases in phrasal conjuncts in 3-5-year-old and adult speakers of English. Findings show that English-speaking children are less likely to employ the ‘old-before-new’ order than adults and are also not adult-like in using prosody to mark information status. Our study suggests that even though intonation and word order are linguistic devices that are acquired early, their use to mark information status is still developing at age four.

  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