I'm Aislinn (she/her).
[æʃliːn kiːoʊ]
I'm a PhD student in the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Jennifer Culbertson and Professor Simon Kirby. I use behavioural experiments and computational modelling to study the evolution of linguistic structure.
Questions I'm interested in include:
- What kinds of pressures and biases operating during language production might help explain typological universals?
- How do languages achieve an optimal trade-off when these biases pull in different directions from those operating during comprehension or learning?
- Is there observable variation in how different individuals mentally represent linguistic structure despite surface similarities in their output?
My research is funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (an ESRC doctoral training programme).
Before my PhD, I did an MSc in Evolution of Language and Cognition, also at the University of Edinburgh (2020-21). I received my bachelor's degree in Linguistics from Newcastle University (2010-13).
Publications
Keogh, A., Kirby, S., & Culbertson, J. (2024). Predictability and variation in language are differentially affected by learning and production. Cognitive Science, 48(4), e13435 [URL] [PDF]
Keogh, A., Kirby, S., & Culbertson, J. (2022). In search of a unified mechanism for regularisation of linguistic variation. Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium, 360-366 [URL] [PDF]