Human communication in developmental and comparative perspective.

In her PhD, the applicant will conduct controlled experiments to systematically investigate the nature of infant communication. This research will make an immediate contribution to our understanding of human communication and its development in infants, and will also, in turn, facilitate direct comparison with other groups (adult humans, non-human primates) to inform critical questions about what makes humans distinctive, and the link between human minds and human culture, potentially helping to explain what makes human culture so distinctive. This work will directly build on recent theoretical analysis, developed by one member of the supervisory team, that has highlighted gaps in our present knowledge, and advanced our understanding of the differences between human and nonhuman
communication.