Eric Meinhardt

Starting Fall 2021, I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego.

Previously, I had been a graduate student at UC San Diego Linguistics, where my co-advisors were Leon Bergen and Eric Baković.

You can contact me at [the first letter of my first name][my last name][at]ucsd.edu.

Research

My research interests lie at the intersection of linguistic theory and computational cognitive science: my work seeks to clarify and evaluate theories of language structure, typology, and change through examination of mathematical models of language production, comprehension, and learning, and their application to corpus data.

To date, my research has centered around explanations for why languages have the lexicons, sound patterns, and word formation that they do, drawing on work in phonological theory, phonetics, the computational psycholinguistics of word recognition, morphology, and mathematical models of cultural evolution.

Bio

I completed my undergraduate degree in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics from the University of Rochester in 2012. Prior to coming to San Diego, I was awarded a one-year scholarship at Rochester to study mathematical models of evolutionary processes — population genetics, genetic optimization algorithms, and evolutionary game theory.