Research

Children's comprehension of disjunction

For my Ph.D. dissertation, I investigated the comprehension of the disjunction word or in Bengali-speaking children. This research is situated within the broader field of pragmatic development, with a particular focus on how children acquire scalar implicatures, a type of context-dependent inferences that go beyond the literal meaning of sentences.
      My primary research questions were twofold: first, whether preschool-aged children can reliably derive scalar implicatures from disjunctive sentences (e.g., understanding that “A or B” can imply “not both A and B” in certain contexts); and second, what factors underlie their apparent difficulty with these pragmatic inferences.
      To address these questions, I employed experimental methods designed to probe children’s interpretations of disjunctive sentences in controlled contexts, allowing for a careful distinction between literal understanding and pragmatic enrichment. My study offers empirical observations and perspectives on the intersection of semantics and pragmatics in early language development, highlighting cross-linguistic patterns of pragmatic acquisition and the cognitive mechanisms that support them.

Processing scalar implicature

In this project, I investigate how adults process scalar implicatures, focusing on the cognitive effort involved in deriving these context-dependent inferences. Scalar implicatures occur when a speaker implies a stronger meaning than the literal content of a statement. For example, interpreting “some” to mean “not all.” A key question in the literature is whether deriving such implicatures imposes additional cognitive cost compared to understanding the literal (logical) meaning of a sentence.
      My central hypothesis is that the processing effort required to compute scalar implicatures is comparable to that required for computing logical meaning. This assumption is based on the idea that both the lower-bounded (logical) meaning and the upper-bounded (implicature) meaning are accessible within the context and are not actively removed from the listener’s cognitive environment. In other words, the listener does not need to actively seek contextual information to generate the implicature; it is already embedded in their cognitive environment. To test this hypothesis, the project employs experimental methods that measure real-time processing, such as reaction-time tasks, or reading-time paradigms. The broader aim of this research is to clarify the cognitive mechanisms underlying pragmatic inference and to refine theoretical models of sentence processing.

Disjunction expressions in Indian languages: Usage of conditional morphemes

This project aims to capture the nature of disjunction words used in the languages of the Indian sub-continent. Like many widely-studied languages, South-Asian languages like Hindi or Bengali use more than one expression to refer to disjunction in sentences. For example, Hindi uses ‘yā’ and ‘nahito’; Bengali uses ‘bā ‘ and ‘noyto’ to refer to disjunction. Interestingly, words like ‘nahito’ and ‘noyto’ are bi-morphemic which can be split into an ‘if not’ construction. This phenomenon is not noticed in languages such as English, Japanese, Mandarin, or French for instance. Such bi-morphemic disjunction expressions are seen in other Indian languages too. Such as Meitei, a north-east Indian language, uses the word ‘natraga’ or ‘natradi’ to refer to disjunction which too have the ‘if-not’ meaning. For example, ‘natra’ means ‘not’ and ‘ga’ is a conditional bound morpheme.
      I aim to investigate why there is more than one expression for simple disjunction in these languages and how they are used - especially what significance the ‘if-not’ construction holds in these languages. My greater objective is to see how the information can feed/counter the existing theories about the human language faculty.