Spencer Caplan

Spencer Caplan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He directs the Psycholinguistics Lab, contributes to the Cognitive Science affiliation, and is the interim director of the master's program in computational linguistics through Fall 2025.

Research Interests: His work integrates linguistics, computation, and cognition, focusing on language acquisition and processing. He develops computational and algorithmic models of language learning and mental representation, while also employing experimental methods such as eye-tracking, parsing, categorization, and perceptual learning. His research applies quantitative, corpus, and statistical techniques to address questions in theoretical linguistics. Secondary interests include Chinese languages, cognitive psychology (attention, memory, learning), formal language theory, NLP, phonology, and software engineering.

Publication Trends: His recent publications appear in high-impact journals like PLOS One, Psychological Science, Cognition, PNAS, and Glossa. The work spans computational modeling of language learning, experimental investigations of linguistic computation, and corpus-based syntactic analysis, reflecting a strong interdisciplinary approach combining theoretical insight with empirical and quantitative rigor.

Scientific Affiliations and Mentors:

• Ph.D. Advisor Team: Charles Yang, John Trueswell, Mitch Marcus
• Undergraduate Mentor: Eugene Charniak
• Collaborators: Deniz Beser, Kajsa Djärv, Neal Fox, Doug Guilbeault, Alon Hafri, Jordan Kodner, Eric Mandelbaum, Griffin Pion, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Katie Schuler, Elliot Schwartz, Hongzhi Xu, Chen Yu

Advising and Grants: While specific advising and grant records are not detailed in the text, his leadership roles (lab director, interim program director) and active publication record suggest significant involvement in mentoring students and securing research support. His GitHub repositories indicate ongoing, computationally intensive research projects.

Labs and Teams: He leads the Psycholinguistics Lab at CUNY Graduate Center and has been affiliated with the Language Learning Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and the Developmental Intelligence Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.