I am an assistant professor in the Department of Language Studies and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My name is pronounced /ʃoʊhiniː bhɔʈʈoʃaliː/.

My research is situated at the intersection of computational linguistics and neurolinguistics. I utilize contemporary computational models to gain further insight into language comprehension in the brain.

[curriculum vitae]    [research]    [teaching]

Current Projects

Through fMRI and MEG studies, the goal of this project is to investigate the role of context during naturalistic language comprehension. Utilizing language models and topic models, we are examining how they can represent different sources of contextual knowledge and embody cognitive hypotheses, both during speech perception and during sentence processing.

This project looks into predicate argument structure and its role in incremental sentence processing. Through fMRI and MEG experiments, we probe how the syntactic and semantic constraints of verbs guide us during sentence processing, especially diathesis alternations, subcategorization frames, and selectional restrictions.

Through a series of fMRI, MEG, EEG studies, we are exploring how different ngram and neural language models differ in their predictions based on the training corpora and to what extent these LMs are psychologically plausible. This will shed light on the types of representations being captured by LMs and how we can use them to test mechanistic hypotheses from cognitive neurosciencee.

Natural language comprehension relies on at least two cognitive operations: compositional, structure-building and retrieval of memorized units. This project investigates the neural correlates of processesing noncompositional expressions vs. compositional expressions, along with the temporal dynamics of these two operations. In addition, we are examining how our results corroborate current neurocognitive models of language processing.

Past Projects:

This online edX module is designed towards a better understanding about bilingualism and challenges, myths, and benefits associated with it as seen through various language acquisition and developmental psychology studies. This project was in colloboration with Barbara Lust, Carissa Kang, and María del Mar Guttiérez.
[link]

I worked on a research project to train a finite state model to detect phonological cues in a speech corpus using a ASR toolkit (Kaldi). These models were able to detect different types of phenomenon (e.g., word-level stress patterns in Bengali and lenition effects in Korean) and provided empirical evidence about phonological patterns in these languages.

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
(in prep)
[preprint]

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]

Using surprisal and fMRI to map the neural bases of broad and local contextual prediction during natural language comprehension
Shohini Bhattasali, Philip Resnik
Proceeding of the Findings of the ACL 2021
Virtual, August 1 - 6, 2021.
[paper]

Modeling incremental language comprehension in the brain with Combinatory~Categorial Grammar
Milos Stanojevic, Shohini Bhattasali, Donald Dunagan, Luca Campanelli, Mark Steedman, Jonathan Brennan, John Hale
Proceedings of the 11th workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2021)
Virtual, June 10, 2021.
[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:

Lexical Information Associated with Verbs as a Predictive Cue during Sentence Processing
ONR MURI on Document Comprehension Annual Review Meeting
George Mason University, October 13, 2022.

Neurocomputational Approaches to Language Processing
Invited talk, Computational Linguistics research group
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, August 5, 2022.

Experimental Approaches in Linguistics
Guest lecture, LING 110: Introduction to Linguistic Analysis
University of Rochester, March 23, 2022.

Neurocomputational Approaches to Language Processing
Invited talk, Linguistics Colloquium
Department of Language Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough, March 9, 2022.