Sayantan Mandal

I completed my doctoral research (submission date: February, 2024) at the Concordia Center for Cognitive Science and Linguistics, and I am currently a MITACS Globalink Researcher at CNRS’s (France) Bases, Corpus and Langage (BCL) Laboratory and Complexity and Cognition (CoCo) Laboratory in Université Côte-d’Azur in Nice, France. I completed my doctoral coursework at the Center for Cognitive Science and Linguistics at Université Concordia in Montreal, Quebec (Canada), while most of my empirical research work was carried out under the banners of CNRS’ BCL Laboratory, and the School of Health (formerly, PERFORM Centre) in Concordia. Here I am supervised by Prof. Tobias Scheer and Prof. Charles Reiss.

I study the human faculty of language from the perspectives of biolinguistics, computational theory of mind and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, I explore the nature of phonological representations and computations, their modular architecture in the mind and their interaction with the sensori-motor systems involved in speech.

Currently, my research follows two distinct but related lines of inquiry. My primary research at the moment is the Mind 2 Brain project, initiated by Prof. Tobias Scheer (CNRS) and Dr. Alexander Marx Chabot (University of Maryland), and seeks to isolate the neurophysiological signatures uniquely associated with phonological computations (as opposed to memory suppletion, morpho-syntactic computations etc.) using electro-encephalography (EEG).

A related strand of research, carried out at Concordia’s School of Health, seeks to employ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the possibility that phonological primes (distinctive features) might be instantiated by functionally specialised neural maps in the auditory cortex.

I hold two masters’ degrees from The University of Auckland (New Zealand) and E.F.L. University (Hyderabad, India) respectively. Before embarking on my current research I was a post-graduate researcher in psycholingustics at the MARCS Institute of Brain, Behavior and Development, in Sydney, Australia. Here I worked with Prof. Catherine T. Best (primary supervisor), Prof. Anne Cutler, and Prof. Jason Shaw (Yale University), and received training in experimental psycholinguistic methodology. The work here was focussed primarily on bilingual phonology in adult early/simultaneous Malayalam-Australian English bilinguals. The work done here has directly contributed to most of my research skills, and provides the foundation on which I currently build my work.