About me
I'm Nayana (pronounced /najəna/), and I really like minimal personal websites.
I am a doctoral candidate working with Prof. Samar Husain at the Psycholinguistics Lab, housed in the Linguistics Unit at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Delhi.
As a psycholinguist, my broad interests lie in the area of sentence processing in SOV languages. I am currently working on exploring the interaction of predictive processing and morphological complexity in agglutinating languages such as Malayalam using behavioural and eye-tracking experiments, alongside corpus-based methods. I have also worked with other morphologically complex languages such as Bangla and Mundari.
If you would like to chat about my work, please mail me at nayana [dot] raj [at] hss [dot] iitd [dot] ac [dot] in. I also do enjoy fretting about the many aspectual forms in Malayalam, so if you work on anything aspect-adjacent in your language, I'd love to compare notes as well.

2025 Updates
- June: We're at EEL 2025, where we're implementing Bayesian models and querying treebanks.
- June: Suvrojit Nath's and my work, titled 'Cross-linguistic Differences in Morphological Priming across Morphologically Complex Languages: Evidence from Malayalam and Bangla', has been selected for a talk at X-PPL 2025.
- April: Paper accepted at CogSci 2025 , titled 'Leveraging Prediction to Investigate the Mental Lexicon: Evidence from an Agglutinating Language'. Look out for our poster if you're attending!
- January: Presented a talk titled 'What can predictive processing tell us about the mental lexicon? Insights from Malayalam' at SCONLI 2025.