Simon Kirby

Professor Simon Kirby is a faculty member at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences within the University of Edinburgh, holding a Personal Chair of Language Evolution. His research and teaching focus on the origins and evolution of human language, cultural evolution, and interdisciplinary collaboration between science and art.

Research Interests: Kirby investigates language as a product of evolutionary processes, emphasizing how cognitive biases, iterative learning, and cultural adaptation shape linguistic structure. His work spans computational simulations, experimental studies on syntactic category emergence, and crossmodal synesthesia, aiming to bridge theoretical linguistics with empirical discovery.

Projects & Grants: He has secured funding from the

• British Academy
• Leverhulme Trust
• ESRC
• AHRC
• Learned Societies
• UK-based charities

for projects like Fluidity and abstraction in mental representations of the nominal phrase and From Natural to Conventional word order, exploring mechanisms of linguistic evolution over decades.

Advising: Kirby has mentored over 100 Master’s students and 40 PhD students, including current advisees like Fausto Carcassi, Fiona Kirton, and Andrea Ravignani (University of Vienna).