Sihan Chen’s fascination with languages began when he was a teenager in his high school choir in his hometown of Shenzhen, China. “We sang religious and folk songs in different languages like Mandarin, English, Albanian, and Latin, and I would look up how to pronounce words in different languages,” he says. These early experiences planted the seed for his current research interests in cognition and language as a third-year PhD student in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS). Under the guidance of Professor Edward “Ted” Gibson, Chen studies…
