Anna Jon-And Senior lecturer, Director of Centre for Cultural Evolution

I am a senior lecturer of Portuguese with specialization in linguistics. I do research at the interdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Evolution, where I am also the director. My research interests involve different aspects of language evolution. I am interested in understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying human linguistic abilities and general mechanisms of language change, related to demographic, social and language-internal dynamics. I work collaboratively in the field of cultural evolution, which allows for studying language together with other aspects of human culture and integrating perspectives and methods from other disciplines, including for example psychology, biology, sociology, mathematics, machine learning, and complex systems.

Language origin

A comparative perspective on cognition, memory and learning in humans and other animals is useful when searching for the roots of language.  I have conducted collaborative research on evolutionary transitions in humans, building models based on the theory that sequence representation is uniquely human and a necessary prerequisite for language, thinking and cumulative culture on a large scale. My current rsearch project aims at identifying minimal cognitive prerequisites for language learning, by building a cognitive architecture based on sequence memory, chunking and schematizing.

Language variation and change

Statistical analysis of variation in natural language data is a key to describing language structure and understanding language change. I have collected and analysed diachronic and synchronic data sets from African varieties of Portuguese, where change has occurred rapidly due to the extensive spread of Portuguese in the past 40 years. This allows for testing how different conditions for language acquisition and use influence the diffusion of innovative linguistic forms. I have also built computational agent-based models to test hypotheses on how demographic parameters, like proportions of first and second language learners in a population, may account for observed linguistic changes.

Language contact

Language contact tend to cause relatively drastic structural change and sometimes even the emergence of new languages. Contact languages and varieties provide interesting data for studying how basic cultural selective pressures on language, such as learnability and expressivity, shape and change language structure. I have studied grammatical restructuring in African contact varieties of Portuguese, a mixed language in Brazil, and conducted cross-linguistic analysis of word length and frequency in pidgins, creoles and non-contact languages.