Welcome!
Why are there so many different languages in the world?
How did this astonishing linguistic diversity come about?
And what are the social, environmental and cognitive pressures that shape the evolution of language in our species?
These are fascinating questions that represent the topics of my research so far. My work focuses on linking core aspects of language learning, cultural evolution, and language diversity using a range of novel behavioral paradigms and computational models.
My goal is to shed light on the communicative pressures and cognitive constraints that shape social interaction and language use in our species, and to identify the social, environmental, and cross-cultural factors that lead to language diversity and cross-linguistic variation. I am also interested in animal cognition and communication, child development, human history, space, and data analysis.
I am a Minerva research group leader, leading the Language Evolution and Adaptation in Diverse Situations (LEADS) Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Read all about our projects here!
I am also a Lecturer in Social Interaction at the Centre for Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (cSCAN) at the University of Glasgow.
About me
I started my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Cognitive Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. I was particularly excited about the link between language and cognition, which is why I decided to switch my math studies to Linguistics. I then continued to a Master's degree in Cognitive Science at the Hebrew University, focusing on Language Evolution and Statistical Learning. I worked at the Language Learning and Processing Lab led by Prof. Inbal Arnon, and also helped to co-found and manage the first Living Lab in Israel: a unique public-oriented research laboratory located inside the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem.
I then continued to do a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, under the supervision of Prof. Antje Meyer. My research focused on simulating the cultural evolution of languages in different environments, and testing how the social environment affects the grammar of languages. I did this by developing a novel group communication paradigm (see picture on the side), which tested the live formation of new languages that were created in the lab by mini-societies of interacting people.
After completing my PhD, I was a research associate with Prof. Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then a research associate at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at VUB, led by Prof. Bart de Boer.
On a more personal note, I consider myself a fast learner with a charismatic and energetic personality, who is friendly, passionate, highly communicative, and in pursuit of new ideas. I find it important to contribute to the community beyond my work as a researcher, so I am actively engaged in the broader dissemination of my research to audience outside of academia (check out my Twitter feed!). I also actively promote open access by putting all data and scripts on OSF, advocate for having kind and supporting working environments, and advance gender diversity and equality in the programming community by organizing coding workshops for women by women (check out R-ladies Nijmegen for events!).
In my free time, I really enjoy spinning, rock climbing, and acroyoga. I also study NVC and practice empathy and seld-connection.
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In the Media
My work has received attention from international newspapers and science magazines, and was covered by venues such as The Times and The Economist. It also featured in popular online linguistic podcasts such as Abralin Ao Vivo, Talk the Talk (aka Because Language) and The Dissenter Show. For the full list of media outlets that include my work, check out my CV.
Publications
Published Peer-Reviewed Papers
Raviv, L., Jacobson, S. L., Plotnik, J. M., Bowman, J., Lynch, V., & Benítez-Burraco, A. (2023). Elephants as a new animal model for self-domestication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(15), e2208607120. doi:10.1073/pnas.2208607120. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., Peckre, L., & Boeckx, C (2022). What is simple is actually quite complex: a critical note on terminology in the domain of language and animal communication. Journal of Comparative Psychology. doi: 10.1037/com0000328. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., Lupyan, G., & Green, S. C. (2022). How variability shapes learning and generalization. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Advance online publication. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2022.03.007. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., de Heer Kloots, M., & Meyer, A. (2021). What makes a language easy to learn? A preregistered study on how systematic structure and community size affect language learnability. Cognition, 210, 104620. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104620 [download PDF]
Raviv, L., Meyer, A., & Lev-Ari, S. (2020). The role of social network structure in the emergence of linguistic structure. Cognitive Science, 44(8), e12876. doi:10.1111/cogs.12876 [download PDF]
Raviv, L., Meyer, A., Lev-Ari, S. (2019b). Larger communities create more systematic languages. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science, 286(1907). doi:10.1098/rspb.2019.1262 [download PDF]
Raviv, L., Meyer, A., Lev-Ari, S. (2019a). Compositional structure can emerge without generational transmission. Cognition, 182, 151-164. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.09.010 [download PDF]
Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2018a). Systematicity, but not compositionality: Examining the emergence of linguistic structure in children and adults using iterated learning. Cognition, 181, 160-173. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.08.011
Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2018b). The developmental trajectory of children’s auditory and visual statistical learning abilities: Modality-based differences in the effect of age. Developmental Science. 21(4): e12593. doi:10.1111/desc.12593 [download PDF]
Havron, N., Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2018). Literate and preliterate children show different learning patterns in an artificial language learning task. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 2, 21-33. doi:10.1007/s41809-018-0015-9 [download PDF]
Published books and book chapters
Raviv, L., & Kirby, S. (2023). Self-Domestication and the cultural evolution of language. Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution, pp. C60S1–C60S8. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198869252.013.60. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., (2020). Language and society: how social pressures shape grammatical structure. Doctoral Dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. ISBN: 78-94-92910-12-7. [download PDF]
Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings
Cambier, N., Miletitch, R., Burraco, A. B., & Raviv, L. (2022). Prosociality in swarm robotics: A model to study self-domestication and language evolution. In Ravignani, A., Asano, R., Valente, D., Ferretti, F., Hartmann, S., Hayashi, M., Jadoul, Y., Martins, M., Oseki, Y., Rodrigues, E. D., Vasileva, O. & Wacewicz, S. (Eds.): Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE). doi:10.17617/2.3398549. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., Jacobson, S. L., Plotnik, J. M., Bowman, J., Lynch, V., & Benítez-Burraco, A. (2022). Elephants as a new animal model for studying the evolution of language as a result of self-domestication. In Ravignani, A., Asano, R., Valente, D., Ferretti, F., Hartmann, S., Hayashi, M., Jadoul, Y., Martins, M., Oseki, Y., Rodrigues, E. D., Vasileva, O. & Wacewicz, S. (Eds.): Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE). doi:10.17617/2.3398549. [download PDF]
Galke, L., Ram, Y., & Raviv, L. (2022). Emergent Communication for Understanding Human Language Evolution: What's Missing? Emergent Communication Workshop, Tenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2204.10590. [download PDF]
Cambier N., Miletitch, R., Benítez-Burraco, A. & Raviv, L. (2021). First Steps Toward a Swarm Robotics Model of Self-Domestication and Language Evolution. In The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021). doi:10.48448/30dy-ez50.
Raviv, L., Meyer, A. & Lev-Ari, S. (2020). Network Structure and the Cultural Evolution of Linguistic Structure: A Group Communication Experiment. In Ravignani, A., Barbieri, C., Martins, M., Flaherty, M., Jadoul, Y., Lattenkamp, E., Little, H., Mudd, K. & Verhoef, T. (Eds.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (EvoLang13). doi:10.17617/2.3190925. [download PDF]
Thompson, B., Raviv, L. & Kirby, S. (2020). Complexity Can Be Maintained in Small Populations: A Model of Lexical Variability in Emerging Sign Languages. In Ravignani, A., Barbieri, C., Martins, M., Flaherty, M., Jadoul, Y., Lattenkamp, E., Little, H., Mudd, K. & Verhoef, T. (Eds.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (EvoLang13). doi:10.17617/2.3190925. [download PDF]
Lei, L., Raviv, L. & Alday, P. (2020). Using Spatial Visualizations and Real-World Social Networks to Understand Language Evolution and Change. In Ravignani, A., Barbieri, C., Martins, M., Flaherty, M., Jadoul, Y., Lattenkamp, E., Little, H., Mudd, K. & Verhoef, T. (Eds.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (EvoLang13). doi:10.17617/2.3190925. [download PDF]
Ergin, R., Raviv, L., Senghas, A., Padden, C. & Sandler, W. (2020). Community Structure Affects Convergence on Uniform Word Orders: Evidence From Emerging Sign Languages. In Ravignani, A., Barbieri, C., Martins, M., Flaherty, M., Jadoul, Y., Lattenkamp, E., Little, H., Mudd, K. & Verhoef, T. (Eds.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (EvoLang13). doi:10.17617/2.3190925. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., Meyer, A., & Lev-Ari, S. (2018). The role of community size in the emergence of linguistic structure. In Cuskley, C., Flaherty, M., Little, H., McCrohon, L., Ravignani, A. & Verhoef, T. (Eds.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference (EVOLANGXII). doi:10.12775/3991-1.096. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2016). Language evolution in the lab: The case of child learners. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2016). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. [download PDF]
Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2016). The developmental trajectory of children's statistical learning abilities. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2016). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. [download PDF]
