I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language Studies and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My research is situated at the intersection of computational linguistics and cognitive science of language.

I received my Ph.D in Linguistics from Cornell University in 2019 with a graduate minor in Cognitive Science and I was advised by John Hale. After my graduate studies, I was a postdoc at the University of Maryland's Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and primarily worked with Philip Resnik.

My name is pronounced /ʃoʊhiniː bhɔʈʈoʃaliː/ and you can hear the pronunciation here.

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Research Themes

I utilize contemporary computational models to gain further insight into language comprehension in the brain. This line of research involves interfaces among natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. I am currently investigating a) how do various syntactic and semantic constraints affect top-down prediction during sentence processing? b) how does linguistic processing at different levels of representation interact with other cognitive mechanisms such as attention, memory, and cognitive control?

I look at how the linguistic patterns and features in various datasets can help uncover bias and misinformation usings various NLP tools. This line of research involves leveraging computational tools, such as topic models and language models, on texts from various domains such as online social media and public health repositories, to help us improve these systems by minimizing bias and misinformation.

Recent Publications:

Eelbrain: A toolkit for continuous analysis of EEG/MEG with temporal response functions
Christian Brodbeck, Proloy Das, Joshua P. Kulasingham, Shohini Bhattasali, Philip Resnik, Phoebe Gaston, Jonathan Z. Simon
(resubmitted)
[preprint]

Neural correlates of object-extracted relative clause processing across English and Chinese
Donald Dunagan, Milos Stanojevic, Maximin Coavoux, Shulin Zhang, Shohini Bhattasali, Jixing Li, Jonathan Brennan, and John Hale.
[paper]

Le Petit Prince multilingual naturalistic fMRI corpus
Jixing Li, Shohini Bhattasali, Shulin Zhang, Berta Franzluebbers, Wen-Ming Luh, R. Nathan Spreng, Jonathan Brennan, Yiming Yang, Christophe Pallier, John Hale
Scientific Data, 9(1), 1 - 15.
[paper] [data]

Neural correlates of semantic number: A cross-linguistic investigation
Donald Dunagan, Shulin Zhang, Jixing Li, Shohini Bhattasali, Christophe Pallier, John Whitman, Yiming Yang, John Hale
Brain and Language 229, 105110.
[paper]

Parallel processing in speech perception with local and global representations of linguistic context Christian Brodbeck, Shohini Bhattasali, Aura Cruz Heredia, Philip Resnik, Ellen Lau, Jonathan Simon
eLife, 11: e72056
[paper] [data]

Neurocomputational models of language processing
John Hale, Luca Campanelli, Jixing Li, Shohini Bhattasali, Christophe Pallier, Jonathan Brennan
Annual Review of Linguistics, 8:1, 427 - 446.
[paper]

Recent Presentations:

Progression of acoustic, phoneme, lexical, and semantic neural features emerge for different speech listening
Dushyanthi Karunathilake, Christian Brodbeck, Shohini Bhattasali, Philip Resnik, Jonathan Simon
Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN 2022)
San Diego, CA. November 12 - 16, 2022.

Verbs’ selectional preferences modulate N400 response in sentence processing
Chiebuka Ohams, Shohini Bhattasali, Philip Resnik
14th Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2022)
Philadelphia, PA. October 6 - 8, 2022.

Long-distance dependencies in Chinese, English, and French brains
Donald Dunagan1, Maximin Coavoux, Shulin Zhang, Shohini Bhattasali, Jixing Li, Christophe Pallier, Nathan Spreng, Jonathan Brennan, John Hale
14th Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2022)
Philadelphia, PA. October 6 - 8, 2022.

Progression of acoustic, phoneme, lexical, and semantic neural features emerge for different speech listening
Dushyanthi Karunathilake, Christian Brodbeck, Shohini Bhattasali, Philip Resnik, Jonathan Simon
14th Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2022)
Philadelphia, PA. October 6 - 8, 2022.

Semantic frames as a predictive cue during sentence processing
Chiebuka Ohams, Shohini Bhattasali, Philip Resnik
28th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2022)
York, UK. September 7 - 9, 2022.
[slides]

Recent Talks:

How can computational linguistics help us understand human language processing?
Invited talk, De Leidsche Flesch Study Trip, Leiden University
Toronto, ON. May 5, 2023.

How can computational linguistics help us understand human language processing?
Keynote speaker, 10th Annual Scarborough Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (SULC)
University of Toronto Scarborough. March 3, 2023.

How can computational linguistics help us understand language comprehension?
Invited talk & panelist, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Students Association: Women in Cognitive Science
University of Toronto. March 1, 2023.

How can tools from NLP help us understand human language comprehension?
Invited talk, Data Sciences Institute Blitz Workshop
University of Toronto. February 16, 2023.

Neurocomputational Approaches to Language Processing
Invited talk, Bilingualism and Multilingualism lab meeting
Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto, February 7, 2023.

Current Courses:

Recent Courses:

Recent News:

UofT Department of Linguistics blog: Newest Faculty Member: Shohini Bhattasali!

UTSC Vice Principal Academic & Dean: 5Q with Shohini Bhattasali

UofT Data Sciences Institute: Catalyst Grant Fuels U of T Researchers’ Community-Powered AI to Tackle Harmful Content on Social Media

Outside of work, I enjoy swimming, reading, and cooking elaborate recipes.

I am married to Dr. David Schlüter.

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