Very happy to have been selected as a runner-up for the Hurford Prize at #EvolangXVI for my talk on how children's narrow learning bottleneck accelerates the emergence of statistical properties of language! Huge congrats to @maisyhallam.bsky.social for an amazing winning talk 🎉

Cultural Transmission Promotes the Emergence of Statistical Properties That Support Language Learning Language is passed across generations through cultural transmission. Prior experimental work, where participants reproduced sets of non-linguistic sequences in transmission chains, shows that this pr...

New paper with @inbalarnon.bsky.social and @simonkirby.bsky.social! Learnability pressures drive the emergence of core statistical properties of language–e.g. Zipf's laws–in an iterated sequence learning experiment, with learners’ RTs indicating sensitivity to the emerging sequence information.

Excited to share this paper, and grateful to be part of the team behind it :)