Khuyen N. Le

I’m a PhD student at the Psychology department of UC San Diego, working with Dave Barner in the Language & Development Lab. My research builds models of conceptual abstraction and analogy across language, culture, and developmental stages, using quantitative behavioral data collection and analysis of large-scale datasets such as language models.

I completed my M.S. in Computer Science, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction, my B.S. in Cognitive Science and my B.A. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. I combine my background in cognitive psychology with my training in UI/UX research and software engineering to provide user-centric, data-driven solutions for novel interaction design questions.

selected publications

Is it language or is it culture? re-examining cross-cultural similarity judgments using lexical co-occurrence

Khuyen Le, Michael Frank, and Alex Carstensen

Stanford Digital Repository 2021

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Is “cow” more closely related to “grass” or “chicken”? Speakers of different languages judge similarity in this context differently, but why? One possibility is that cultures co-varying with these languages induce variation in conceptualizations of similarity. Specifically, East Asian cultures may promote reasoning about thematic similarity, by which cow and grass are more related whereas Western cultures may bias similarity judgments toward taxonomic relations, like cow-chicken. This difference in notions of similarity is the consensus interpretation for cross-cultural variation in this paradigm. We consider, and provide evidence for, an alternative possibility, by which notions of similarity are equivalent across contexts, but the statistics of the environment vary. On this account, similarity judgments are guided by co-occurrence in experience, and observing or hearing about cows and grass or cows and chickens more often could induce preferences for the relevant grouping and account for apparent differences in notions of similarity across contexts.