About

Ellis Cain

ecain@ucmerced.edu

Academic bio

I am a PhD student in the Cognitive and Informational Sciences program at UC Merced. In my various research projects, I explore the relationship between aging and cultural evolution: how lifespan learning influences our semantic and syntactic representations, how population dynamics interact with cognitive decline in the context of language evolution, and whether measurement methods show (or hide) age-related differences. I also study distortion in cross-cultural transmission through translation chains.

Currently, I work in Rachel Ryskin’s Language, Interaction, and Cognition Lab and collaborate with various professors at UC Merced. Previously, I worked with Chen Yu on verb-specific statistical learning and the ecological validity of cross-situational learning.