Emily Davis

Emily Davis is a graduate student in linguistics. She is interested in the evolution of human language, especially concerning the phenomenon of recursion-- the process by which one sentence can be nested within another. Recursion is a characteristic of human language, but it may be neither specifically linguistic nor specifically human. For example, there is evidence for recursion in non-linguistic domains of cognition, such as navigation, calculation, task planning, and tool use. And there is evidence that some intelligent animals use recursion in the process of making tools-- such as the highly intelligent New Caledonian Crow. Emily is curious about how these cognitive abilities relate to each other (in both humans and animals) and may have contributed to the evolution of language. She is also interested in how new languages emerge, such as creoles and local sign languages, and in the process of iterated learning, the modification of sequences through repeated transmission from person to person. In her spare time, she likes to watch and photograph local birds.