Thank you for visiting this page! Our work wouldn’t be possible without the contributions of participants in our experimental studies, research scholars, students, and postdocs.

Want to participate in an experimental study? Thank you! Participating in our experimental studies helps with our scientific work, advance knowledge for the ultimate benefit of society. Participants often find our experiments fun and engaging, too. We are the MIT Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory on Mechanical Turk and CPL MIT on Prolific. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our human subjects data collection is currently taking place only through web-based experiments, but in ordinary times we run in-lab experiments (check this space again for updates).

Are you looking for an undergraduate research assistant position? We post research assistant positions on MIT’s UROP Openings webpage. Typically undergraduate research assistants work in our lab for credit the first semester, with options to continue either for credit or on a paid position after the first semester. Undergraduates working more than one term in our lab often wind up contributing as co-authors to published research papers. If you are not an MIT student or able to cross-register at MIT, we might not be able to offer you a standard for-credit or paid position, but if you are keenly interested in our work please get in touch anyway and we can determine what arrangements may be possible. Please include a current resume/CV, transcript, and statement of interest with any inquiry you make regarding research opportunities.

Are you interested in working in our lab as a post-baccalaurate research scholar? Please consider applying for the Post-baccalaureate Research Scholars Program in Brain and Cognitive Sciences if you are eligible. The deadline for the 2025–2027 program has passed, but applications should open again in late fall 2025 for the 2026–2028 program. If you’re looking more broadly for post-bac research assistantship positions, we encourage you to monitor the Cognitive Science Society’s announcements listserv as well as the mailing list for the Human Sentence Processing Society and AMLaP.

Are you a current or prospective master’s student interested in working with us? The Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department has a new 6–9 MEng program open to currently enrolled Computation and Cognition (6–9) majors at MIT. Note that this program is best suited for students who wish to work toward a master’s degree but do not intend to enroll in a doctoral program in a related field. Masters students in EECS and Media Arts & Sciences sometimes do research projects with us as well. If you believe that a research project you would like to do as part of your masters degree would be a good fit for our group, please contact Roger with a description of your background, a current resume/CV, transcripts, a description of your proposed research project, and an explanation of why you think it is a good fit. (Due to bandwidth constraints, Roger may not respond if you don’t include all this information in an inquiry.) Please note that we do not currently have funding available to support research assistantships for masters students.

Interested in joining our lab as a PhD student? Our lab continues to be open to highly qualified PhD students. In MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences PhD program, first-year students do rotations with several PIs and then officially join a lab at the end of their first year. If you are interested in working with us as a BCS PhD student, please apply to our PhD program in the fall and include an explanation of your interest in our lab (and in MIT’s broader interdisciplinary landscape in language, cognitive science, and computation) as part of your application. More information about how our PhD program works, and the typical background of successful applicants interested in this lab, can be found here. If you are already in the MIT BCS or another related PhD program at MIT or another university and are potentially interested in working with us, please contact Roger directly to tell us about your background, interests, and goals. (Due to bandwidth constraints, Roger may not respond if you don’t include all this information in an inquiry.)

Looking for a postdoctoral position? We currently have no open positions for postdoctoral associates. However, we are open to hosting extramurally funded postdoctoral fellows whose research interests are a good match for our work. Potential extramural funding sources for postdoctoral fellowships often depend on citizenship/permanent residency status and/or where you finish(ed) your PhD. US government supported sources include NIH’s NRSA Fellowships and NSF’s SBE Postdoctoral Fellowships. The Schimdt Science Fellows is another potential source of funding. At MIT, postdoctoral fellowship opportunities can be found here, here, here, here, and here—this is a non-exhaustive list. Please contact Roger if you have identified postdoctoral fellowships you’re eligible for and would like to apply to to work in our lab, including your background, research interests, CV, which fellowships you envision applying for, and what kind of research project you envision proposing. (Due to bandwidth constraints, Roger may not respond if you don’t include all this information in an inquiry.)

We generally do not host pre-college interns except through established internship programs that place participants in our lab, or visitors for whom a clear established collaboration has not already been worked out. We receive a high volume of messages regarding possible internships or visits, so inquiries that don’t conform to the above guidelines will generally go unanswered.