Cory Shain

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

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

  1. Cer Cort
    No evidence of theory of mind reasoning in the human language network
    Cerebral Cortex 2022
  2. J Neuro
    Robust effects of working memory demand during naturalistic language comprehension in language-selective cortex
    Journal of Neuroscience 2022
  3. Cur Dir Psych Sci
    Similarity of computations across domains does not imply shared implementation: The case of language comprehension
    Fedorenko, Evelina, and Shain, Cory
    Current Directions in Psychological Science 2021
  4. ACL
    CDRNN: Discovering complex dynamics in human language processing
    Shain, Cory
    In Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing 2021
  5. Cognition
    Continuous-time deconvolutional regression for psycholinguistic modeling
    Shain, Cory, and Schuler, William
    Cognition 2021
  6. 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
  7. Npsy
    fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension
    Neuropsychologia 2020