Tessa Verhoef

I am an Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) where I lead the Emergent Communication Group, co-founded the Creative Intelligence Lab and conduct research at the intersection of language, cognition, cultural evolution and computation.

At Leiden University I teach in the Creative Intelligence and Technology and Computer Science MSc programs. Currently I teach the courses Modes of Cognition and Computational Creativity.

On this page you will find information about my group, our research interests, publications and contact information.

Current projects

Emergence of (Universal) Language Phenomena with Neural Agents

A collaborative project with Arianna Bisazza in which we are developing a novel framework for simulating language learning and change with artificial languages and neural network learners: NeLLCom (Neural-agent Language Learning and Communication). Together with our PhD students, we have so far used it to investigate:

The emergence of the word-order/case-marking trade-off: Lian et al. 2023 [TACL]; 2024 [CoNLL]
Differential object marking: Lian et al. 2025 [CogSci]
Dependency length minimization: Zhang et al. 2024 [LREC-COLING]
Patterns of lexical change: Zhang et al. 2025 [EMNLP]

See also Tom Kouwenhoven's PhD thesis

Neural measures of emerging space-time language

While many results in the field of language evolution suggest that language adapts to the brain, the brain responses of participants in typical language evolution experiments has rarely been directly measured. With Tyler Marghetis (UC Merced) and Seana Coulson (UC San Diego) I investigate the role of cognitive biases by exploring participants’ brain responses as they learn a lab-evolved artificial language containing space-time mappings, inspired by the fact that many languages use the vocabulary of space to express concepts of time. In a series of experiments with human participants, we saw:

The emergence of systematic space-time mappings in interacting pairs: Verhoef et al. (2016) [CogSci]
The appearance of fully compositional artificial languages after transmission to new learners: Verhoef et al. (2022) [CogSci]
Clear neural evidence for individual initial preferences for certain mappings over others: Verhoef et al. (2024) [Cognition]

Gendering Algorithms

An interdisciplinary project with Eduard Fosch-Villaronga funded by a seed grant from the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges Initiative, bringing together the Faculty of Law and Computer Science to understand how algorithms impact different communities, focusing for instance on gender biases and other issues related to equity and inclusion in AI. Within this collaboration we have published about:

Diversity issues in AI for medicine: Fosch-Villaronga et al. (2022) [Computer Law & Security Review]
Biases in Affective Computing datasets: Verhoef et al. (2023) [ACII]
Gender biases in algorithmic gender classification methods for social media: Fosch-Villaronga et al. (2025a) [Technology in Society]; (2025b) [Big Data & Society]

Past work

For my BSc and MSc I studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. I wrote my MSc thesis at the Affective Social Computing lab at Florida International University in Miami, to learn about natural human-machine interaction. Obviously, a good source to look at in this context is human-human interaction, but I quickly discovered that we actually knew quite little about the origins of the unique and intricate way in which humans communicate and how it developed into the languages we use today.

Language is a major characteristic that makes us unique as a species. Understanding its origins became one of my favorite topics and I decided to pursue a PhD in Language Evolution. In 2013, I obtained my PhD degree at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC) of the University of Amsterdam. My project was about the evolution of speech and I worked with Prof. Bart de Boer and Prof. Simon Kirby. My PhD thesis can be found here.

Since then I have worked on various other domains of language, such as sign language, space-time mappings and iconicity, and I have been developing quantitative and experimental methods to study the evolution of language further. Most of this happened while I was a postdoc at the Center for Research in Language and worked with Prof. Carol Padden at UC San Diego. For more details, see my publications and CV.

Tessa Verhoef

Current projects

Past work

Contact

My office is in the Gorlaeus Building at Leiden University and you can find me in room BE 3.08.

Alternatively, please get in touch at: t.verhoef [at] liacs.leidenuniv [dot] nl.

I am also on LinkedIn, and this is my CV