New paper on Murrinhpatha children’s understanding of kinship lexicon and grammar (post by Dr Alice Mitchell)

Among the vast number of things children need to learn about language is how to appropriately refer to other people. One way to do this is to use kinship terms—words like ‘great-grandmother’, ‘brother-in-law’, or ‘sister’. The particular set of kinterms a child needs to know will obviously depend on the languages they’re learning to speak. … Read more

Cross-disciplinary anthropology & biology workshop Part 1: Behaviour

Anthropology & Biology cross-disciplinary workshop part 1: Behavioural science Organisers: Fiona Jordan & Arsham Nejad Kourki University of Bristol | 9 September 2020 There is fascinating research on the evolution of behaviour in many disciplines across the University of Bristol, particularly in biology and anthropology. We’re hosting a workshop to bring together postgraduate and postdoctoral … Read more

The Grandparent Naming Survey

Here at excd.lab we recently launched our Grandparent Naming Survey.  It’s being run by Jo Hickey-Hall, Research Support Assistant, as part of the Usage subproject for VariKin. VariKin-Usage specifically investigates how people use kinship language by using corpus linguistics, surveys, and interviews to quantify patterns of usage in spoken and written language. How frequently are kinship … Read more

Postdoc position in cultural phylogenetics

Applications extended and closing May 22nd: please note extended project date to November 2020. We’re hiring! If you have skills in phylogenetic comparative methods, and you’re keen to understand cultural and linguistic diversity, then we have a one-year postdoc position on our VariKin project. Here’s the job ad: Applications are invited for a position of … Read more

VariKin on the radio

Fiona recently gave an overview of the VariKin project for CoastFM and SourceFM in Cornwall. She talked to Ben Makin on his Celebrity Science show about our three projects on kinship term evolution and the KinBank database, kinship language usage, and fieldwork on acquisition by children. The conversation ranged further into speculation on how the language … Read more

Summer intern, Jasmine Calladine’s guest blog post

This summer I worked with Dr Alice Mitchell researching how person reference terms are used in child-directed speech in English. To do this we made use of the CHILDES database (example pictured below), a collection of transcriptions of children’s speech.  Instances of person reference were recorded and coded into five categories, kin terms, kin terms … Read more

Stats corner: is the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample really standard?

Post by Péter Rácz. We use large cross-cultural datasets to test theories of cultural evolution. These tests face what is commonly referred to as “Galton’s problem” (see here for an elegant overview). Since cultural traits co-evolve (think historical linguistics) and are traded freely in close proximity (think Sprachbund effects), their co-variance will be partly explained … Read more

Overview of the CAKTAM Workshop January 2018

Notions of family and kin terms vary in complexity and structure, so to what extent does linguistic and cultural variation affect the acquisition of kinship knowledge? While kinship provides the major framework for social organisation in many societies, we still know very little about how children learn to categorise different kinds of kin.  The ‘Children’s … Read more

Conversation across languages and cultures: Dr Joe Blythe

The past few weeks the lab has hosted Dr Joe Blythe as  Benjamin Meaker Visiting Fellow from the University of Bristol’s Institute for Advanced Studies (thanks IAS!). Joe’s final event is this evening, and we’re delighted to be hosting his public lecture: Conversation across languages and cultures: Cross-linguistic perspectives on taking turns to talk. Details: … Read more

CAKTAM Workshop Handbook and Programme

Today we are delighted to welcome colleagues from around the globe as we meet for this evening’s opening of the CAKTAM Workshop.  Over the next few days we’ll be sharing and learning together, ideas and methods for children’s acquisition of kinship knowledge. We’ll be keeping you updated on Twitter and providing an overview here of all the … Read more