Research

Research Interests

Language Acquisition
Cognitive Development
Cross-cultural approaches to psychology
Meta-science, heterogeneity, and psychological measurements

Current Projects

1. Meta-Analysis of the word extension literature

Although well-studied for some time now, with creative studies and experiments that provided so many insights into how young children acquire early words (mostly nouns) and use them. The early word learning and generalization literature has been quite hard to consolidate and thus build upon, given the heterogeneous approaches, procedures, and measures employed to study the phenomenon.

We try to have a better understanding of this research question of what underlies children's concepts of early words by using a meta-analytic approach to synthesize evidence, as well as look for covariates that moderate the variation we see in the literature. This will enable us to better assess and adjudicate different theoretical explanations of phenomena like the well-studied shape bias. A common and grounding potential learning bias that facilitates vocabulary development.

Check: Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Examining the robustness and generalizability of the shape bias: a meta-analysis. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. Read here

2. Do variations in early lexical statistics explain the cross-cultural differences in word extension literature?

The word extension shape bias is found by various studies to be different in English-speaking US children, compared to east asian language speakers. Is it due to different regularities in early vocabulary?

Check: Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Limited cross-linguistic variation in the lexical statistics of nouns in early vocabulary (BUCLD 2024)

3. The role of individual, procedural, and stimulus variation in children's noun extensions in laboratory settings

Check: Investigating heterogeneity in shape bias: a study on procedural, stimuli, and age-related variations. Samah Abdelrahim, Sadio Abdi, Meesha Ryan, Michael Frank (The 15th Annual BCCCD Conference, January 9-11 2025 - BCCCD25) (YouTube video here)

4. What exactly is a complex object? And what does complexity even mean?

Coming soon...

Teaching

Teaching assistant, Longitudinal Data Analysis in Social Science Research, Stanford University, Spring 2025
Teaching assistant, Introduction to Statistical Methods, Stanford University, Fall 2024
Head teaching assistant, Introduction to Social Psychology, Stanford University, Spring 2024
Guest lecturer, Psych 35/ Symsys 200, Minds and Machines, Stanford University, Summer 2024
Teaching assistant, Introduction to Developmental Psychology, Stanford University, Autumn 2023
Teaching assistant, Introduction to Statistical Methods, Stanford University, Fall 2023
Course Assistant, language development course, Columbia University (TC), Fall 2021
Teaching assistant, Programming logic controller lab, University of Khartoum (UOFK), Spring 2018
Teaching assistant, Digital control systems, University of Khartoum (UOFK), Fall 2017

Mentorship

Graduate mentor, Spring 2025 (Meesha Ryan, Sadio Mohamed Abdi, Claire Lee, Nivedita Kripalani)
Graduate mentor, Winter 2024 (Meesha Ryan, Sadio Mohamed Abdi, Hoang D Nguyen, Claire Lee, Nivedita Kripalani)
Graduate mentor, Fall 2024 (Meesha Ryan, Sadio Mohamed Abdi, Hoang D Nguyen)
Graduate mentor, Bing Honors College, Stanford University, Summer 2024
Graduate mentor, Psych Summer Internship (Mentee: Sadio Mohamed Abdi), Stanford University, Summer 2024

Conference posters/papers

Investigating heterogeneity in shape bias: a study on procedural, stimuli, and age-related variations. Samah Abdelrahim, Sadio Abdi, Meesha Ryan, Michael Frank (The 15th Annual BCCCD Conference, January 9-11 2025 - BCCCD25)
Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Limited cross-linguistic variation in the lexical statistics of nouns in early vocabulary (BUCLD 2024)
Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Examining the robustness and generalizability of the shape bias: a meta-analysis. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. Read here
Bisbee, N., Tang, J. E., Yu, S. J., Lyu, Z. X., Abdelrahim, S., & Gordon, P. (July 7 – 10, 2022). Relations between exact number and exact equality: Developmental and cross-cultural perspectives. [Conference Poster]. International Congress on Infant Studies (ICIS) 2022 XXIII Biennial Congress, Ottawa, Canada.
Tang-Lonardo, J., Bisbee, N., Jain, M., Kirby, E., Kim, S. B., Abdelrahim, S., Gerami, S., Sezcon-Cepeda, D., Coffel, M., & Gordon, P. (May 26 - 29, 2022). The Neural Mechanisms of Parallel Individuation and Numerical Approximation. [Conference Poster] Association for Psychological Science (APS) 2022 Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, USA.
Tang, J. E., Bisbee, N., Jain, M., Kirby, E., Kim, S. B., Gerami, S., Sezcon-Cepeda, D., Gilchrist, K., Abdelrahim, S., Coffel, M., & Gordon, P. (July 27 - 30, 2022). The Neurobehavioral Basis of Parallel Individuation and Numerical Approximation. [Conference Poster]. Cognitive Science Society 2022, 44th Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada.