Emily Davis

Emily Davis is a graduate student in linguistics and advisee of Robert Kluender who also works in the Gentner Lab, and has worked with Kenny Smith at the University of Edinburgh. She recieved her PhD in linguistics from UCSD in 2023. She is interested in the cognitive basis of linguistic recursion: the process by which one sentence can be nested within another. Where does recursion in languages come from? How does linguistic recursive structure relate to other cognitive abilities, such as task planning and tool use? Why does center-embedding persist in language despite its processing difficulties? Evidence from animal and human cognitive experiments suggests that recursion may not be specifically linguistic, or specifically human. She has investigated these phenomena through several approaches: corpus studies of the prevalence of center-embedding across different languages and the factors that appear in naturalistic examples, iterated learning (by humans) of both artificial language and nonlinguistic symbol sequences, and artificial grammar learning by European Starlings. In her spare time, she likes to watch and photograph local birds.