Interests:

Cognitive Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience, Psycholinguistics, Birdsong

I study the relationship between cognition and the structure of communication systems. My background is in birdsong, looking at how song evolves over generations. Birds learn their communication systems similarly to humans, from their parents and other adults and juveniles in their environment. When they don’t receive input, they sing abnormal songs. I have studied how these abnormal (isolate) songs change when birds learn them and pass them onto other young birds. More recently, I have been studying similar processes in humans. I teach adult participants artificial languages (mini made-up languages) with abnormal features and study how these features change when people use the languages to communicate with each other or transmit them to other learners.

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