Aislinn Keogh

Exploiting individual differences to bootstrap communication Author summary A fundamental question in the field of language evolution is how a communication system can emerge in a population that is initially unable to communicate. One theory is that human comm...

Interacting agents can create shared communication systems without ever knowing if signals are successfully received. The conventionalisation process involves a curious interaction between joint attention and individual behavioural differences. doi.org/10.1371/jour.... Work with Casimir Fisch.

How number systems shape our thinking and what it means for learning, language and culture A new collection of research papers examines how humans conceptualize numbers and the numeral systems we’ve build around them.

theconversation.com/how-number-s...

Very cool!

We investigate the influence of two communicative pressures: production favours reuse of more easily articulated sounds, comprehension favours distinctiveness of word forms. Competition between these individual-level mechanisms can give rise to emergent structural properties of language.

The lexicon adapts to competing communicative pressures: Explaining patterns of word similarity Cross-linguistically, lexicons tend to be more phonetically clustered than required by the phonotactics of the language; that is, words within a langu…

⚠️ New paper! Why do words sound so similar? In an agent-based model + communication game, we show that production/comprehension pressures trade off to shape lexicon structure.

In @cognitionjournal.bsky.social w/ @simonkirby.bsky.social & Jenny Culbertson.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Despite green being my favourite colour, I prefer the white/blue cover

@sheinalew.bsky.social 👀

Thoughts and prayers please: I have reached the stage of pregnancy where I'm having to pirate e-books of books I already physically own because my belly is in the way of holding up a hardback 😭

@maisyhallam.bsky.social Please advise

Well, one thing's for sure: it certainly lived up to the title and abstract 🙄

"Steven Pinker is perhaps the nicest person I know in academia" was truly a bold opening statement. You were doing God's work in the chat!

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Walking down a narrow pavement at peak times with an umbrella is antisocial behaviour, change my mind

I suspect @maisyhallam.bsky.social will agree with this pretty viscerally

Predictive Structure Emerges During the Generalisation of Kin Terms to New Referents Abstract. Despite cross-linguistic diversity in how kin relations map to terminology, there are constraints on which kin may be categorised together. But what are the constraints on kin term variation...

New paper in @openmindjournal.bsky.social with @simonkirby.bsky.social, @kennysmithed.bsky.social and Fiona Jordan! Kinship terms overwhelmingly exhibit predictive structure - terms in one part of the system help us predict other terms - a pattern which emerges because it helps us generalise better.

Just to be the exception to this, my husband and I originally got together (when I was 26 and he was 30) by me telling him "I fancy you". You just gotta lay it out very explicitly for some folks, y'know 🤣

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco.

Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee:
Sarah Alami (co-chair)
Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair)
Zachary Garfield
Edmond Seabright

Durham's Dunagree Lab continues to be the most wonderful workplace. Thank you to @sheinalew.bsky.social, @chimpanzeve.bsky.social, @fhillemann.bsky.social, @amandinevisine.bsky.social and others not on Bluesky for the surprise baby shower today 🥹

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Two part photo showing the book cover for More Than Words on the left and a crocheted square on the right that was inspired by the book.

Aislinn Keogh @mandolinguist.bsky.social gave my new book to her mother to help her understand some of Aislinn's research area. Her mother is in a book-crochet group; she loved the book so much that she made a blanket (aka granny) square inspired by the book cover! This is so fantastic and touching!

Oh good, my preprint from nearly a year ago that had still not been post-moderated has now disappeared 🙃

How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia) Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus mus...

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez
doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

This was such a fun conversation about childhood, play, and agency across cultures. Thanks for having @sheinalew.bsky.social & I on the show!

I am advertising 2 positions in language evolution with my group at ‪‪@dondersinst.bsky.social:
📢 Fully-funded PhD position (Robotics/AI 🤖) www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
📢 Postdoc position (Virtual Reality 🎮)
www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
Deadline for applications is August 14th. Please RT! :)

Oh boy, me too

Introducing Dr Keogh! 🎓 Very emotional to have finally closed the chapter on my time at the @uoe-cle.bsky.social 😭 but glad to have passed this milestone in the company of my wonderful supervisors @simonkirby.bsky.social and Jenny Culbertson, and my PhD twin Elizabeth Pankratz. We made it!

#PhDone

Me and @maisyhallam.bsky.social had fun at the museum yesterday! 😄🐒

been a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...

Honestly the concussions example is getting weirder the longer I look at it 😂

I thought the point of the Russia example was that people find it grammatical but it's weird because it doesn't actually mean anything. Whereas this example seems semantically coherent: doctors wouldn't mind if I'd had e.g. 2 concussions, but I've actually had 3+.