Spencer Caplan

Spencer Caplan

Visiting Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
Swarthmore College

phone: (610) 328-8272
office: 258 Science Center
email: scaplan1 at swarthmore dot edu

I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Swarthmore College. My research is at the intersection of linguistics, computation, and cognition: I build computational and algorithmic models of language acquisition and language processing and design psycholinguistic experiments.

Current Semester

In Fall 2020 I am teaching CS65 (Natural Language Processing).

Fall 2020 Schedule
    CS65 2:00-3:15 TR Zoom
    CS65A 1:15-2:45 Wednesdays Start on Zoom, move to Slack
    CS65B 3:00-4:30 Wednesdays Start on Zoom, move to Slack
    CS65A Lab Exempt Meeting Wed: 9:00-10:00am slack (#officehours)
    Office Hours Tue: 3:30-4:30, and by appointment slack (#officehours)
    Research Mondays and Fridays .

Non-Swarthmore Students

If you are not a student at Swarthmore, you probably want my research webpage located here.

Journal Articles

  •    S. Caplan, A. Hafri, & J. Trueswell. (in press) "Now you hear me, later you don’t: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech" Psychological Science (pre-print | OSF repo)
  •    S. Caplan, J. Kodner, & C. Yang. (2020) "Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language" Cognition (pdf | source code | demo)
  •    K. Schuler, J. Kodner, & S. Caplan. (2020) "Abstractions are good for brains and machines: A commentary on Ambridge (2020)" First Language (pdf)
  •    S. Caplan & K. Djärv. (2019) "What usage can tell us about grammar: Embedded verb second in Scandinavian" Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 101 (pdf)