Shira Tal

I am a Chancellor's Fellow in the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh. 

My research focuses on how our cognition shapes and is shaped by language structure. For example, are some language structures more cross-linguistically common than others because they are easier to learn? What properties of the language input we receive allow us to learn languages more readily? I approach these questions from a developmental perspective: I ask how children differ from adults in the way they learn and use language, in what ways the linguistic input they receive is different, and how can these differences eventually influence the types of linguistic systems we see across languages.