SPENCER CAPLAN

Under Review and In Prep

• The discrete perception of continuous speech
  (pre-print) — under review
  (with Karthik Durvasula) [pdf | code]
• A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions
  (pre-print) — R&R back under review
  (with Doug Guilbeault & Charles Yang) [pdf | code]
• Uncommon Sense Effect: experimental evidence for underspecification as the mental basis of logical inference
  (in preparation)
  (with Elliot Schwartz, Griffin Pion, Jake Quilty-Dunn, & Eric Mandelbaum)

Collaborators over the years

Deniz Beser, Eugene Charniak, Kajsa Djärv, Karthik Durvasula, Neal Fox, Doug Guilbeault, Alon Hafri, Jordan Kodner, Tony Kroch, Matt Malone, Eric Mandelbaum, Mitch Marcus, Griffin Pion, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Katie Schuler, Elliot Schwartz, John Trueswell, Hongzhi Xu, Charles Yang, Chen Yu.




Selected Publications

• Word learning as category formation
  (2025) PLOS One [pdf | code]
• Polysemy and Inference: Reasoning with Underspecified Representations
  (2025) Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society
  (with Elliot Schwartz, Griffin Pion, Jake Quilty-Dunn, & Eric Mandelbaum) [pdf]
• Using an Egocentric Human Simulation Paradigm to quantify referential and semantic ambiguity in early word learning
  (2023) Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society
  (with Misty Peng, Yayun Zhang, & Chen Yu) [pdf]
• Saccade amplitude statistics are explained by cortical magnification
  (2023) Proceedings of the International Conference on Development and Learning
  (with Marcel Raabe, Francisco López, Zhengyang Yu, Chen Yu, Bertram Shi, & Jochen Triesch) [pdf]
• Another model not for the learning of language
  (2022) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
  (with Jordan Kodner & Charles Yang) [pdf]
• Now You Hear Me, Later You Don't: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech
  (2021) Psychological Science
  (with Alon Hafri & John Trueswell) [pdf | osf]
• The Immediacy Of Linguistic Computation
  (2021) Doctoral Dissertation [pdf]
• Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language
  (2020) Cognition
  (with Jordan Kodner & Charles Yang) [pdf | code | demo]
• Abstractions are good for brains and machines: A commentary on Ambridge (2020)
  (2020) First Language
  (with Kathryn Schuler & Jordan Kodner) [pdf]
• What usage can tell us about grammar: Embedded verb second in Scandinavian
  (2019) Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics
  (with Kajsa Djärv) [pdf | code]
• The Acquisition of Vowel Harmony from Simple Local Statistics
  (2018) Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society
  (with Jordan Kodner) [pdf | code]
• Leveraging Lexical Substitution for Parser Adaptation
  (2015) Undergraduate Thesis
  (with Neal Fox, David McClosky, & Eugene Charniak) [pdf]