Simon Todd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at U C Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the power of passive listening for developing and accessing knowledge about language varieties and the people that speak them. He has examined how people who don't speak a language gain impressive implicit knowledge of its regularities by being exposed to it often, and  how social stereotypes based on the way that someone sounds can influence what listeners remember them saying. His work uses a combination of computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and statistical analysis of large bodies of language data.