Shawn N. Cummings, Ph.D. (he/him)

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in Language Science at the University of California, Irvine, working primarily with Drs. Xin Xie and Chigusa Kurumada. I am interested in how experience shapes the way we perceive stimuli in our environment.

My research program focuses on the cognitive mechanisms underlying adaptation, specifically during speech perception. As each new talker we encounter produces their words differently, How do we nevertheless easily and robustly understand one another?

This is a fundamentally interdisciplinary question, concerned with language but also with mind and brain. My work brings a breadth of perspective, with formal training across disciplines including linguistics, psychology, and the neurobiology of language. My research combines approaches from behavioral psychophysics, computational modeling, and cognitive neuroscience.

Upcoming talks

On 9/24/25, I will give a talk on Perceptual learning and the statistics of speech input as part of the external speakers series at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language.