Shiva Upadhye | Department of Language Science

I am an incoming Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University, starting Summer 2026.

My research interests lie at the intersection of language, cognition, and computation, with a particular focus on how language is represented, processed, and generated by humans and artificial systems. Much of my work leverages theories and insights from cognitive science and psycholinguistics, computational modeling, natural language processing, and behavioral experimentation in service of these questions.

I recently completed my PhD in Language Science at the University of California - Irvine, where I was advised by Richard Futrell and affiliated with the Language Processing Group and the meaning lab. Before that, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science with a concentration in Machine Learning and Neural Computation and a minor in Math from the University of California - San Diego. I also spent a year in industry, working on signal processing for optical sensing across a range of research applications.

Research

Publications

Baidildinova M., Upadhye S., Wagner A., Mayer C., & Futrell R. (2026). Quantifying mutual intelligibility gradients in Turkic languages using language models. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics.

Upadhye S. & Futrell R. (2025). Back to the Future: The Role of Past and Future Context Predictability in Incremental Language Production. (Revise and Resubmit).

Upadhye S., Li Y., Li J., Attali, N. & Scontras G. (2025). GPT-2’s Production and Comprehension of Scope Ambiguity. PragLM @ Conference on Language Modeling.

Upadhye S. & Futrell R. (2025). Examining Future Context Predictability Effects in Word-form Variation and Word Choice. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Upadhye S., Li J., & Futrell R. (2025). SPACER: A Parallel Dataset of Speech Production And Comprehension of Error Repairs. The 14th edition of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics.

Upadhye S. & Futrell, R. (2023). Typing time PWI: A scalable paradigm for studying lexical production. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Upadhye, S., Li, J., & Futrell R. (2023). Bridging production and comprehension: A computational model of error generation and correction. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics.

Upadhye S. & Futrell, R. (2022). Information-theoretic analyses of disfluencies in Speech. NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Information-Theoretic Principles in Cognition Systems.

Upadhye S., Bergen L., & Kehler A. (2020). Predicting Reference: What do Language Models learn about Discourse Models? Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Presentations

Baidildinova M., Upadhye S., Wagner A., Mayer C., & Futrell R. (2026). Quantifying mutual intelligibility gradients in Turkic languages using language models. Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics. San Diego, CA, USA. (Poster)

Upadhye S. & Futrell R. (2025). Repairing, Fast and Slow: Lexical and Contextaual Pressures on the Timecourse of Error Processing in Naturalistic Production. The 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Cambridge, MA, USA. (Poster)

Upadhye S., Yeaton JD., Yi E., & Hickok G. (2025). Speakers and typers adapt their planning strategies to meet sentence production demands. 66th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Denver CO, USA. (Poster)

Li J., Upadhye S., Li Y., Attali N., & Scontras G. (2025). GPT-2 prefers ambiguous utterances following informative contexts. BlackboxNLP @ EMNLP 2025. Suzhou, China. (Poster)

Upadhye S. & Futrell R. (2025). Examining Future Context Predictability Effects in Word-form Variation and Word Choice. 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. San Francisco, CA, USA. (Talk)

Upadhye S., Yeaton JD., Yi E., & Hickok G. (2025). Typing Fluency reveals Psycholinguistic Dynamics of Sentence Production. The 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. College Park, MD, USA. (Poster)

Li J., Upadhye S., & Futrell R. (2025). SPACER: A Parallel Dataset of Speech Production And Comprehension of Error Repairs. The 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. College Park, MD, USA. (Poster)

Li Y., Li J., Upadhye S., Attali N., & Scontras G. (2025). Language models prefer ambiguous utterances following informative contexts. The 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. College Park, MD, USA. (Poster)

Yeaton JD, Upadhye, S., Futrell R., & Hickok G. (2024). The (Non-)Sentence Repetition Task: A novel assessment of expressive and receptive syntactic competence. 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. Brisbane, Australia. (Poster)

Upadhye S., Attali N., & Scontras G. (2023). The role of world knowledge for interpreting aspect ambiguity. Tenth Biennial Meeting of Experimental Pragmatics. Paris, France. (Poster)

Li, J., Upadhye, S., & Futrell R. (2023). Bridging production and comprehension: A computational model of error generation and correction. The 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Pittsburgh, PA, USA. (Poster)

Upadhye S. & Futrell R. (2022). Information-theoretic analysis of disfluencies in speech. NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Information Theoretic Principles in Cognitive Systems. New Orleans, LA, USA. (Poster)