CLiMB Lab @ Stanford

Laboratory for Computation & Language in Minds & Brains

Welcome to the online home of the CLiMB Lab at Stanford! The grand goal of the lab is to solve human language comprehension. How do our brains go from sensation to meaning so effortlessly, and how do they learn this ability from experience? This simple goal presents immense challenges because understanding language requires understanding the different processes that collectively constrain it: learning, computation, and brain function. We therefore take an interdisciplinary approach that reflects this scope, recruiting trainees from many academic backgrounds (linguistics, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience) and building a culture where cross-disciplinary training and integrative research are the norm: linguists run neuroimaging experiments, computer scientists run human behavioral experiments, and neuroscientists study the functional organization of artificial intelligence (AI) models.

selected publications

JoCN

Distributed Sensitivity to Syntax and Semantics throughout the Language Network

Shain, Cory, Kean, Hope, Casto, Colton, Lipkin, Benjamin, Affourtit, Josef, Siegelman, Matthew, Mollica, Francis, and Fedorenko, Evelina

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2024

Bib PDF

@article{shainetal24:nlength,
  author = {Shain, Cory and Kean, Hope and Casto, Colton and Lipkin, Benjamin and Affourtit, Josef and Siegelman, Matthew and Mollica, Francis and Fedorenko, Evelina},
  title = {Distributed Sensitivity to Syntax and Semantics throughout the Language Network},
  year = {2024},
  journal = {Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience},
  section = {articles},
}

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},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2307876121},
  journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
  volume = {121},
  number = {10},
  pages = {e2307876121},
  section = {articles},
}

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},
  journal = {Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science},
  volume = {8},
  pages = {177--201},
  section = {articles},
}

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},
  journal = {Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science},
  volume = {8},
  pages = {235--264},
  section = {articles},
}

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},
  section = {articles},
}

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},
  section = {articles},
}

CoNLL

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

@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},
  best_paper = {true},
  section = {papers},
  project = {phonacq},
}

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

@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},
  section = {articles},
  data = {https://osf.io/eyp8q/},
  project = {cdrnn,mempred},
}