Hello! I'm Samah (or in Arabic, سماح), a PhD student in the Psychology Department at Stanford University. I work with Michael C. Frank in the Language and Cognition Lab .

I study how children build the meanings of their first words, and equally, what the field actually knows about this process versus what it assumes. My work sits at the intersection of early word learning and questions about measurement: which findings generalize across languages, procedures, and samples, and which don't. I consider myself a developmental psychologist under construction 😃.

When I'm not running studies with children, analyzing data, or wrestling with statistical models and online experiments, I find myself questioning the scientific endeavor itself: wondering about the legitimacy of psychological findings and the nature of knowledge.

Outside of research, I enjoy listening to Arabic music, watching Arabic dramas, chatting with family and friends, and exploring the rich tradition of Islamic Sufism.