Simon Todd

Simon Todd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with affiliations in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences. He directs the Computational Psycholinguistics of Listening and Speaking (CPLS) Lab and co-leads the CEILing research group. His research focuses on speech perception's cognitive processes and their long-term linguistic implications, combining computational modeling, experiments, and corpus analysis. He also investigates phonology-morphology interactions.

Education: PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University (2019), advised by Dan Jurafsky and Meghan Sumner. Previously completed a BA(Hons) in Mathematics and Linguistics at the University of Canterbury (2012), followed by a postdoc at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour. Holds adjunct status at the University of Canterbury's NZILBB.

Research emphasizes small-scale perceptual biases' role in language change and evolution. Key projects include Māori language phonotactic knowledge among non-speakers, reduplication in morphological segmentation, and BERT's syntactic insights. Recent work explores implicit proto-lexicons and ambient language exposure effects.

Teaching includes courses on programming for linguists, computational linguistics foundations, and advanced topics in speech/text processing. Active in developing tools like Morfessor extensions for reduplication analysis. Collaborates internationally on projects linking perception to language structure and change.