I am about to start my own Minerva research group, the “Language Evolution and Adaptation in Diverse Situations” (LEADS) group, which will be located at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Meanwhile, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
My main interests are the cultural evolution of languages, the social and cognitive pressures that shape human interaction and learning, and the developmental trajectory of language and social cognition in children.
For more information, visit my website (https://www.limorravivevolang.com/) or find me on Twitter! (https://twitter.com/limor_raviv).
Language and Society: How Social Pressures Shape the Grammar of Languages
What are the social, environmental, and cognitive pressures that shape the evolution of language in our species? Why are there so many different languages in the world? And how did this astonishing linguistic diversity come about? These are some of the most interesting questions in the fields of cognitive science and linguistics, and represent the range of topics discussed in my research so far. My work focuses on linking core aspects of language acquisition, language evolution, and language diversity using a range of novel behavioral paradigms and computational models. My goal is to shed light on the communicative pressures and cognitive constraints (e.g., memory limitations, efficiency) that shape social interaction and language use in our species, and to identify the social, environmental, and cross-cultural factors (e.g., population size) that lead to language diversity and to cross-linguistic variation. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research in the past six years (including methods and results from selected projects), as well as present future directions and ongoing work.
