Author Archives: Simon Kirby
The next LEC talk will be given by Bill Thompson on “Evolutionary Arguments Against Linguistic Nativism“. It will be on Tuesday 4th October, 11.00-12.30, Room 1.17 DSB. Hope to see you all there! Simon
Tomorrow (Tuesday), Nic will be giving a short talk about on an in press paper that examines the transmission of information in different types of transmission chains (non-interactive, interactive). Tan, R., & Fay, N. (in press). Cultural transmission in the laboratory: Agent interaction improves the intergenerational transfer of information. Evolution & Human Behavior. We’ll be in [...]
Our first LEC meeting of the new academic year is next Tuesday in DSB 1.17 at 11.00-12.30. Sean will be giving us a talk about his current PhD topic. — “The implications of Bilingualism for Language Evolution” Children are good at learning multiple languages simultaneously. However, learning an extra language leaves the speaker potentially no [...]
Next week, Keelin will be giving a dry run of her talk of the Protolang conference, summarising the results from her recent experiments on correlations between rhythmic learning and fitness. The title is: “Musical protolanguage put to the test” Keelin Murray DSB 1.17, Tuesday 30th August, 11:00 See you all there! Simon
Two talks from two Simons next Tuesday at the LEC! —- “Linguistic structure is the adaptive compromise between communication and learning: new evidence from simulation and experiments” Simon Kirby, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 DSB This will be a summary a bunch of new computational and experimental results that touch on issues such as the role of horizontal [...]
Next week, Christine Caldwell will be visiting from Stirling. Christine has been a pioneer in using techniques from experimental psychology to study cultural evolution in the lab, and has recently been exploring the evolution of communication through cultural transmission. “Adaptiveness and arbitrariness in human cultural evolution”, Christine Caldwell Tuesday 26th July, 11-12.30, DSB 1.17 We’ll [...]
Demonstrating what a fast-moving field we work in, I’m once again having to change the schedule for our LEC talks. Sorry! Next Tuesday, Sean will tell us about his trip to Santa Fe: “What can complex systems science tell us about language evolution?” Sean Roberts Abstract: I’ve spent a month at the Santa Fe Institute [...]
This week, we’ll also have an LEC talk in our usual slot: 11-12.30 Tuesday in 1.17 DSB. Nic Fay will be giving the second part of a talk about his work covering new directions and some of the plans for work he will be developing here. The evolution of human communication systems I’ll present evidence [...]
We’re having a special LEC talk tomorrow (Monday) at 2.00-3.30 in 1.17 DSB from Amy Perfors who is visiting for the day: Language evolution is shaped by the structure of the world: An iterated learning analysis Human languages vary in many ways, but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical [...]
Our next LEC talk will be from Barbora Skarabela: “Systematicity in language evolution: Does the degree of input structure influence language learning?” Tuesday 28th, 11-12.30, DSB 1.17 Cheers, Simon