IIT Madras launches lab to study India’s linguistic diversity

The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras) has launched the ‘Language and Cognition Laboratory’ (LC-Lab) to study India’s linguistic diversity by taking an interdisciplinary and technology-driven approach.

Established at the department of humanities and social sciences, the lab will engage linguistic diversity through experimental linguistics. It will explore how humans perceive, process, and produce language using advanced experimental methods.

IITM director V Kamakoti inaugurated the laboratory, in the presence of the department head Rajesh Kumar and faculty coordinator Anindita Sahoo, among others.

In the long term, the lab aims to contribute to the development of human-centred and linguistically aware AI systems, to help represent India’s languages and cultures in emerging technologies, the institute said. The facility will work closely with the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras to explore the applications of artificial intelligence to language and cognition research.

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Highlighting the need for such interdisciplinary research, Professor V Kamakoti, director, IIT Madras, said, “Linguistics is increasingly moving toward empirical, data-driven inquiry, combining methodologies from the sciences and humanities. India needed a dedicated facility that integrated linguistic theory with modern experimental and computational tools. The Language and Cognition Lab was established to fill this gap—creating a space that connects linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, and contributes to the development of socially relevant, linguistically informed technologies.”

Indian languages, grammar, voice

The LC-Lab will investigate how people process linguistic information by employing techniques such as eye-tracking and reaction-time studies. Its research focuses primarily on Indian languages, offering key insights into how grammar, voice, and sentence structure are understood and produced in multilingual contexts.

While ongoing projects study grammatical voice and copula constructions, upcoming work will examine dyslexia in Indian children, with the goal of improving educational outcomes and developing linguistically relevant teaching interventions.

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Speaking about the lab, Sahoo said, “The Language and Cognition laboratory (LC-Lab) is dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research in language and cognition through the use of technologies that reveal behavioural patterns and enable data-driven understanding of human interaction.”

The lab is currently supported by IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation and Aspire Infolab, Hyderabad, which have contributed to its establishment and research infrastructure.