I am a computational psycholinguist and a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Texas at Austin. My research looks at questions intersecting linguistics, computation, and cognition with a particular focus on language acquisition and language processing. I am a member of the Developmental Intelligence Lab (PI: Chen Yu) in the Department of Psychology, the Center for Perceptual Systems, as well as the broader UT Austin NLP/Computational Linguistics community.
Previously
From 2020 through 2022 I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Swarthmore College.I received my Ph.D from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania where I was jointly advised by the wonderful team of Charles Yang, John Trueswell, and Mitch Marcus. I was a member of the Language Learning Lab in the Department of Psychology in addition to the NLP group in the Department of Computer and Information Science.
My dissertation, The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation, investigates the way that language unfolds over time, and the cognitive restrictions this places on language processing and language acquisition.
Prior to Penn, I completed Undergraduate degrees in Linguistics and Computer Science at Brown University where I worked with Eugene Charniak in the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing.
Hot (
) off the presses
Another model not for the learning of language (in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science)
Now You Hear Me, Later You Don't: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech (in Psychological Science)
Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language (in Cognition)
Online
- me@spencercaplan.org
- scholar.google.com
- github.com/scaplan
- orcid.com
- osf.io/bx6m9/
- spencer.caplan@austin.utexas.edu
Offline
108 E Dean Keeton St
Austin, TX 78712
