Profile

I’m originally from Scotland; I grew up there and in Derbyshire. When I’m not doing research, I write fantasy and science fiction. I also love travelling, learning languages, and playing musical instruments badly.

I work in language evolution and language development. That means I’m interested in where language comes from, how children learn the language around them, and what these two areas of research can tell us about each other. For the language evolution part, I make up fake languages (we usually call them ‘alien’ languages to make it more fun), teach them to people, and see how they learn them and use them to communicate. For the language development part, I study the kinds of things children say when they’re just learning to talk (which can be fun, as they don’t always make much sense at that stage!)

Most of my day is spent working in my office, either planning an idea for a new experiment, doing statistical analyses of data I’ve already collected, or writing papers based on the results. If I’m running an experiment, I’ll be sitting outside the booth where my participants are, attempting to do work but spending most of the time worrying the experiment’s stopped working.