Limor Raviv

Limor Raviv is a Minerva research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where she leads the Language Evolution and Adaptation in Diverse Situations (LEADS) research group. She also holds a part-time Lecturer position in Social Interaction at the Centre for Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (cSCAN) at the University of Glasgow.

Her educational background includes a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Cognitive Science, later switching to Linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, followed by a Master's degree in Cognitive Science at the same institution. She completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics under the supervision of Prof. Antje Meyer, focusing on simulating the cultural evolution of languages in different environments.

Raviv's research centers on understanding why there are so many different languages in the world and how linguistic diversity emerged through social, environmental, and cognitive pressures. She employs innovative methodologies including group communication experiments, language emergence simulations with AI agents, virtual reality, and animal communication research. Her work bridges cultural evolution, language learning, and cross-linguistic diversity to identify the factors that shape language evolution and variation across human societies.

Her publications reveal consistent focus on how social structures, community size, and environmental factors influence language structure and learnability. The research demonstrates how linguistic systematicity emerges in larger communities and how social network structures affect language evolution.

Raviv actively promotes open science practices, putting all data and scripts on OSF, and advocates for kind working environments and gender diversity in STEM. She organizes coding workshops for women through R-ladies Nijmegen and engages in public dissemination of her research through various media outlets.

Her work has received significant media attention from outlets including The Economist, Scientific American, The Times, and Geographical, as well as coverage in linguistic podcasts like Talk the Talk and The Dissenter Show.