Cory Shain

Current: Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Future (Fall 2024): Department of Linguistics, Stanford
cory.shain@gmail.com
curriculum vitae

I’m an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. I use computational and experimental methods to study language in the mind and brain, particularly (1) the cognitive processes that allow us to understand the things we hear and read so quickly, (2) the role played by real-time information processing constraints in shaping language learning and comprehension, and (3) the brain basis both of these abilities and of closely-related domain-general abilities related to perception, memory, problem-solving, and social reasoning. My work intersects machine learning, cognitive (neuro)science, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and (psycho)linguistics.

Previously, I was a post-doctoral researcher at MIT, supervised by Ev Fedorenko. I did my PhD in computational linguistics at Ohio State, where I was advised by William Schuler and Micha Elsner.

selected publications

  1. JoCN
    Graded sensitivity to structure and meaning throughout the human language network
    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2024
  2. PNAS
    Large-scale evidence for logarithmic effects of word predictability on reading time
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2024
  3. Open Mind
    Word Frequency and Predictability Dissociate in Naturalistic Reading
    Shain, Cory
    Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science 2024
  4. Open Mind
    A deep learning approach to analyzing continuous-time cognitive processes
    Shain, Cory, and Schuler, William
    Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science 2024
  5. Cer Cort
    No evidence of theory of mind reasoning in the human language network
    Cerebral Cortex 2023
  6. J Neuro
    Robust effects of working memory demand during naturalistic language comprehension in language-selective cortex
    Journal of Neuroscience 2022
  7. CoNLL
    Best Paper Award
    Acquiring language from speech by learning to remember and predict
    Shain, Cory, and Elsner, Micha
    In Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning 2020
  8. Npsy
    fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension
    Neuropsychologia 2020