Balthasar Bickel
What has evolved in humans is a spectacularly dynamic communication system, subject to relentless diversification. Together with my team in the Distributional Linguistics Lab we explore the mechanisms and biological foundations of this dynamic. For the mechanisms, we use various evolutionary models on language data (grammars, lexicons, corpora) to unravel the ways in which languages diversify over time and space, often in collaboration with population geneticists and geographers. For the biological foundations we use experimental methods (chiefly EEG and eyetracking, some artificial language learning) to explore species-wide constraints on the dynamics of language, and we collaborate with behaviorial biologists to probe analogues and homologous in other animals. Our research is embedded in the NCCR Evolving Language that I lead.