alvin tan

I’m a PhD student in Psychology at Stanford University in the Language and Cognition Lab, advised by Mike Frank. I received my MS in Symbolic Systems also at Stanford, and before that I received my BA in Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, where I did research with Louise Mycock and Kate Nation.

My research focuses on the role of environmental input on language learning in young children—and in machine learning models. Babies are some of the most proficient learners we know, being able to process and integrate information they receive in order to achieve robust, grounded language ability, and I seek to understand how that happens. I use a range of methodological tools to characterise the inputs that children receive and examine how variation in that input results in variation in their language abilities. I’m also interested in the use of machine learning models both as tools for analysis and as plausible cognitive models for learning. Additionally, I’m a enthusiast of open science, meta-science, and big team science.