About me.
I am a assistant professor at University of Georgia in the Linguistics Department. I specialize in syntactic processing, grammar-parser relations, language variation, language acquisition, and South Asian languages.
I previously worked at the Neuroscience of Language Lab (NeLLab) at NYU Abu Dhabi, under Profs. Liina Pylkkänen and Alec Marantz, and as Assistant Professor in the Institute of Linguistics at University of Minnesota.
I am also a co-investigator on the SAVANT grant led by Linnaea Stockall, heading the Bengali/Bangla team.
Apart from linguistics, I pass my time reading, writing, doing nerd things, taking photos, playing the harp, and picking up after my cats Sniffle and Olly.
My last name is pronounced /tʃaˈkon/, please keep the <ó>. I use my first name and middle initial in citations, and he/him pronouns
Photo credit Samantha Wray.
News.
February 21, 2023
Our paper on the word length effects in left fusiform gyrus in Bangla has been accepted for publication in PLOS One!! Thanks to my coauthors, Swarnendu Moitra and Linnaea Stockall, support from the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute and ESRC Grant 'Systematicitiy and Variation in Word Structure Processing Across Languages: A Neuro-Typology Approach’, and the rest of our SAVaNT team!
February 17, 2023
Two new preprints! Again!
The first preprint is a paper that I'm very proud of. I consider it the ‘magnum opus’ of my time in Abu Dhabi. This paper examines how the brain processes simple SOV sentences with ergative subjects in Hindi and Nepali. Why is this interesting? In Hindi, these sentences trigger object-verb agreement, but in Nepali you don't. So, what happens when a reader is processing the object, before the verb is encountered? Hindi brains show a different pattern of activity in left temporo-parietal junction compared to controls, but not Nepali brains. The differences in grammatical structures result in different parsing states, which is detectable in left temporo-parietal activity. Of course, lots of things are the same in the two languages – differential object marking in Hindi and Nepali affects activity in left inferior frontal and anterior temporal regions. This work is co-lead by Subhekshya Shrestha, and greatly enhanced by Brian Dillon, Rajesh Bhatt, ARajesh Bhatt, Diogo Almeida, and Alec Marantz. Check it out here!
The first is an updated version of our paper on Bangla orthographic processing. This is a joint project with Swarnendu Moitra and Linnaea Stockall at Queen Mary University of London. Thanks to our reviewers for helping us connect our research to some other literatures and helping us update our figures. Check it out the revised version here here!
October 6, 2023
Two new preprints!
One is a heavily improved revision of my work with Liina Pylkkänen on the processing of plausible vs. plausible filler-gap dependencies. We find that the brain response to implausible filler-gap dependencies surfaces around 600ms, even when similar implausible relations register a brain response ~400ms. Check it out here!
The second concerns reading in Bangla. Everyone knows that word length exhibits a big effect in reading experiments, which is why we usually control for it. But, how do we quantify ‘word length’ in abugidas, where a single character can be made up of up to 5 or 6 “parts”? It turns out that the visual word form area is most sensitive to the number of minimal “parts” in a word, rather than the number of complex characters. This is joint work with Swarnendu Moitra and Linnaea Stockall, and a part of our big, international SAVaNT collaboration. Check it out here!
July 13, 2023
I have been awarded a University of Georgia Office of Research Seed Grant on the neural responses to rapidly presented, short sentences using high-density electroencephalography (EEG) in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Urdu. This grant will fund upgrades at the University of Georgia EEG system, two undergraduate RAs, and participant and machine costs.