Author Archives: Simon Kirby
Dr Kenny Smith has been promoted to a Readership in Language Evolution out of the normal cycle of promotions in recognition of his world-leading research in language evolution. Congratulations, Kenny!
We’re starting the new semester of LEC talks with a short talk from Cem Bozsahin, an old friend of the LEC who is passing through Edinburgh. This will be a dry run for a talk at the Philosophy and Theory of AI conference, so we can expect the meeting to take substantially less than an [...]
Michael Dunn has joined the LEC as our new Professorial Fellow. Michael works on phylogenetic approaches to language and has an appointment at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He will be working for the University of Edinburgh part-time, developing research collaborations and teaching our postgraduate students. We are very excited to have him join [...]
This will be a dry run of Cat’s AMLAP talk: Communication leads to the emergence of sub-optimal category structures Words divide the world into labelled categories. Languages vary in the categories they label, sometimes to the point of making cross-cutting divisions of the same domain (e.g. spatial relations: Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1999). A [...]
Tuesday 13 August, 11am DSB 1.17 Multiple routes to solving the word mapping problem Molly Lewis mll@stanford.edu Mapping a novel word to its referent is an under-constrained problem. To successfully learn words, children must therefore approach this problem with certain biases. In the literature, two classes of biases have broadly been proposed: in-the-moment pragmatic inferences and higher-order [...]
Chris Sharratt interviews Simon Kirby about his experiences with the Edinburburgh art collective, Found, for the Guardian newspaper. Art and science: ‘different ways of engaging with what matters’
Olga Fehér has joined the LEC on a prestigious Newton Fellowship. Olga is most famous for her research on zebra finches, in which she implemented for the first time an experimentally-controlled analog of cultural transmission of song from an initial non-typical starting point. In essence, this was experimental iterated learning of bird song. You can [...]
Quentin Atkinson is visiting the LEC on MONDAY 4th June. Quentin’s high-profile and provocative work bridges language change, evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, religion, cooperation, and human expansion from Africa. For example, 200 pages of a recent issue of Linguistic Typology were recently set aside for responses to a 3-page Science article he wrote. He’s now [...]
There’s a nice overview of the general turn towards experimental approaches in evolutionary linguistics by groups such as the LEC in Science this week. Simon
Katie Slocombe (University of York) is giving a short series of guest lectures next week, on animal communication (vocal and gestural communication in the wild, referential communication, signal combinations). These lectures are primarily intended for students on the Masters in the Evolution of Language and Cognition, but all are welcome to attend. The times and [...]