Cory Shain

I’m a post-doctoral researcher at MIT, supervised by Ev Fedorenko, and a future Assistant Professor at Stanford Linguistics (starting fall 2024). I did my PhD in computational linguistics at Ohio State, where I was advised by William Schuler and Micha Elsner.

I use computational and experimental methods to study language and the mind, particularly (1) the cognitive processes that allow us to understand the things we hear and read so quickly, (2) the learning signals that we leverage as children to acquire language from the environment, and (3) the role played by real-time information processing constraints in shaping language learning and comprehension.

I often build deep learning models to investigate these questions, and I’m actively developing machine learning techniques to help scientists understand complex dynamical systems like the human mind and brain. My work intersects machine learning, cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, statistics, and (psycho)linguistics.

I’ve also done some linguistic analysis of Guaraní (spoken in Paraguay) and Iyasa (spoken in Cameroon).

selected publications

PNAS

Large-scale evidence for logarithmic effects of word predictability on reading time

Shain, Cory, Meister, Clara, Pimentel, Tiago, Cotterell, Ryan, and Levy, Roger

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2024

Bib PDF

@article{shainetal24,
  author = {Shain, Cory and Meister, Clara and Pimentel, Tiago and Cotterell, Ryan and Levy, Roger},
  title = {Large-scale evidence for logarithmic effects of word predictability on reading time},
  year = {2024},
  pdf = {shain_et_al_24_pnas.pdf},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2307876121},
  journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
  volume = {121},
  number = {10},
  pages = {e2307876121},
  abbr = {PNAS},
  section = {articles},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}

Open Mind

Word Frequency and Predictability Dissociate in Naturalistic Reading

Shain, Cory

Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science 2024

Bib PDF

@article{shain24,
  author = {Shain, Cory},
  title = {Word Frequency and Predictability Dissociate in Naturalistic Reading},
  year = {2024},
  pdf = {shain_24.pdf},
  journal = {Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science},
  volume = {8},
  pages = {177--201},
  abbr = {Open Mind},
  section = {articles},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}

Open Mind

A deep learning approach to analyzing continuous-time cognitive processes

Shain, Cory, and Schuler, William

Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science 2024

Bib PDF

@article{shainschuler24,
  author = {Shain, Cory and Schuler, William},
  title = {A deep learning approach to analyzing continuous-time cognitive processes},
  year = {2024},
  pdf = {shain_schuler_24.pdf},
  journal = {Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science},
  volume = {8},
  pages = {235--264},
  abbr = {Open Mind},
  section = {articles},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}

Cer Cort

No evidence of theory of mind reasoning in the human language network

Shain, Cory, Paunov, Alexander, Chen, Xuanyi, Lipkin, Benjamin, and Fedorenko, Evelina

Cerebral Cortex 2023

Bib PDF

@article{shainetal23:tom,
  author = {Shain, Cory and Paunov, Alexander and Chen, Xuanyi and Lipkin, Benjamin and Fedorenko, Evelina},
  title = {No evidence of theory of mind reasoning in the human language network},
  year = {2023},
  journal = {Cerebral Cortex},
  number = {33},
  pages = {6299--6319},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac505},
  pdf = {shain_paunov_chen_et_al_22.pdf},
  abbr = {Cer Cort},
  section = {articles},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}

J Neuro

Robust effects of working memory demand during naturalistic language comprehension in language-selective cortex

Shain, Cory, Blank, Idan A., Fedorenko, Evelina, Gibson, Edward, and Schuler, William

Journal of Neuroscience 2022

Bib PDF

@article{shainetal22,
  author = {Shain, Cory and Blank, Idan A. and Fedorenko, Evelina and Gibson, Edward and Schuler, William},
  title = {Robust effects of working memory demand during naturalistic language comprehension in language-selective cortex},
  year = {2022},
  journal = {Journal of Neuroscience},
  volume = {42},
  issue = {39},
  pages = {7412--7430},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1894-21.2022},
  pdf = {shain_et_al_22.pdf},
  abbr = {J Neuro},
  section = {articles},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}

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

Bib PDF Code Slides recording

@inproceedings{shainelsner20,
  author = {Shain, Cory and Elsner, Micha},
  title = {Acquiring language from speech by learning to remember and predict},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {195--214},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.15},
  pdf = {shain_elsner_20.pdf},
  slides = {shain_elsner_20_slides.pdf},
  code = {https://github.com/coryshain/dnnseg},
  recording = {https://slideslive.com/38939477/acquiring-language-from-speech-by-learning-to-remember-and-predict?fbclid=IwAR3AtIO57f7EyfTt2ObQycp0bu5EPnP2l99OBEydXIAZXLaTzMEIvfJJ8Lk},
  best_paper = {true},
  abbr = {CoNLL},
  section = {papers},
  selected = {true},
  project = {phonacq},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}

Npsy

fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension

Shain, Cory, Blank, Idan, van Schijndel, Marten, Schuler, William, and Fedorenko, Evelina

Neuropsychologia 2020

Bib PDF Code Data

@article{shainetal20,
  title = {fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension},
  author = {Shain, Cory and Blank, Idan and {van Schijndel}, Marten and Schuler, William and Fedorenko, Evelina},
  year = {2020},
  journal = {Neuropsychologia},
  volume = {138},
  pages = {107307},
  doi = {10.1101/717512},
  pdf = {shain_blank_et_al_20.pdf},
  section = {articles},
  code = {https://github.com/coryshain/cdr},
  data = {https://osf.io/eyp8q/},
  abbr = {Npsy},
  selected = {true},
  project = {cdrnn,mempred},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}