Marieke Woensdregt

PhD Linguistics & English Language

Centre for Language Evolution
Linguistics and English Language
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Email: mwoensdr@ed.ac.uk
Web: https://marieke-woensdregt.github.io/

Street: Room 1.15, Dugald Stewart Building
City: 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AD

Biography

Background

I'm a 3rd year PhD student in the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith, and Chris Cummins. In my PhD I use agent-based models to formalise and explore the hypothesis that language and mindreading (a.k.a. theory of mind) have co-evolved. More specifically, I explore under what circumstances such a co-evolution could have come off the ground, given certain sets of assumptions about how agents communicate and learn, and what cognitive biases and external pressures play a role.