People | CSPL

Principal Investigator

Dr. Lekhnath Sharma Pathak

Assistant Professor · Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University

PhD Cognitive Science · University of Hyderabad

Psycholinguistics · Cognitive Science · Pedagogy · Linguistics

Dr. Pathak founded Nepal's first Cognitive Science & Psycholinguistics Lab. His PhD from the Center for Neural & Cognitive Sciences at the University of Hyderabad (under Ramesh Kumar Mishra) focused on bilingual language processing. His research spans child language acquisition, multilingual cognition, dyslexia, psycholinguistic approaches to honorification, and cross-linguistic spatial semantics.

Beyond the lab, Dr. Pathak has been instrumental in advocating for cognitive science as an academic discipline in Nepal, delivering public lectures and keynotes on the science of learning.

Selected Works

2025 Trilingual parallel processing: Do the dominant languages grab all the attention? (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition)
2025 Immersion in second language does not always attenuate and attrite first language: Evidence from Nepali–English bilinguals (Int. J. Bilingualism)
2023 Spatial communication across languages (Coventry et al., Nature Human Behaviour)
2022 Initiating and Institutionalizing CogSci in Nepal (Gipan)
2022 Nepali–English–Sanskrit parallel activation (Nepalese Linguistics)
2019 Why TU Needs an Academic Program in Cognitive Science
2019 Honorification in Nepali: A Psycholinguistic Perspective (Gipan)
2007 Poshak Revisited: Nepali child language acquisition, 6mo–4.5yr
2005 Thus Spake Poshak: first longitudinal case study
2004 Child Language Acquisition: first study from Nepali
2002 Agglutination in Garo (Nepalese Linguistics)