Professor Simon Kirby FBA

The origins and evolution of language; the interactions between individual cognition, cultural transmission and biological evolution in human populations; art / science collaboration

Elected 2019

Fellow type: UK Fellow
Year elected: 2019
Sections: Linguistics and Philology
Website: https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/simon-kirby

Current post

Professor of Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh; Director of the Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh

Past appointments

University of Edinburgh Director of Graduate School in Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Publications

Language Evolution

Edited by Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby - Published in 2003 by Oxford University Press

Function, Selection and Innateness

Simon Kirby - Published in 1999 by Oxford University Press

Contextual predictability shapes signal autonomy

James Winters, Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith - Published in 2018 by Cognition

Self domestication and the evolution of language

James Thomas and Simon Kirby - Published in 2018 by Biology and Philosophy

Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure

Simon Kirby - Published in 2017 by Psychon Bull Rev

Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication

Jasmeen Kanwal, Kenny Smith, Jennifer Culbertson and Simon Kirby - Published in 2017 by Cognition

Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals

Andrea Ravignani, Tania Delgado and Simon Kirby - Published in 2017 by Nature Human Behaviour

Culture shapes the evolution of cognition

Bill Thompson, Simon Kirby, and Kenny Smith - Published in 2016 by PNAS

Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure

Simon Kirby, Monica Tamariz, Hannah Cornish and Kenny Smith - Published in 2015 by Cognition

Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate

Nicolas Claidière, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby and Joël Fagot - Published in 2014 by Proceedings of the Royal Society of London

Related Fellows

Professor Janet Watson FBA

The documentation and morpho-syntactic description of modern Arabic dialects and Modern South Arabian languages; theoretical phonology and morphology with reference to Arabic and Modern South Arabian

Professor Nicholas Sims-Williams FBA

Philology Central and Inner Asia

Professor Deirdre Wilson FBA

Linguistics

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Professor Simon Kirby FBA

Current post

Past appointments

University of Edinburgh Director of Graduate School in Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences