self-portrait

William S. Clapp

I'm a cognitive scientist and recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. My research probes the cognitive basis of human speech perception and language understanding, primarily using methods from experimental psychology. I am principally concerned with the question of how human listeners are able to convert sound into meaning, with a focus on the roles of memory, attention, and social context. I also have an interest in AI model behavior analysis and AI safety.

I'm continuing to work with my advisor Meghan Sumner as an Affiliated Researcher with the Stanford Phonetics Lab. My dissertation (Socially-guided allocation of attention in the memory encoding of spoken language) was funded by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. It was also supported by the William Orr Dingwall Foundations of Language Fellowship and the Josephine de Karman Fellowship.