Staff profile

I'm a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, where I'm employed on the ERC Starting Grant Children as Agents of Cultural Evolution (PI: Dr Sheina Lew-Levy). In this role, I'm building agent-based computational models of social learning in children and adults, using Approximate Bayesian Computation to fit causal models to field data, and conducting observational and experimental research on children's peer-to-peer language use.

I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 2025, where I was supervised by Professor Simon Kirby and Professor Jennifer Culbertson in the Centre for Language Evolution. In my thesis, Language adapts to pressures from production: Experimental and computational evidence, I explored how the cognitive and motor challenges associated with language production shape the way we learn languages, the way we use them in real-time communication, and the way they change and evolve over time. Before my PhD, I did an MSc in Evolution of Language and Cognition, also at the University of Edinburgh. I received my bachelor's degree in Linguistics from Newcastle University in 2013.

• language evolution
• cultural evolution
• agent-based modelling
• transmission networks
• experimental methods

Conference Paper

• Simulation as a tool for formalising null hypotheses in cognitive science research
  
  Keogh, A., & Pankratz, E. (2024). Simulation as a tool for formalising null hypotheses in cognitive science research. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Who benefits from redundancy in learning noun class systems?
  
  Keogh, A., & Lupyan, G. (2024). Who benefits from redundancy in learning noun class systems? Presented at International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang XV), Madison, Wisconsin.

Journal Article

• Predictability and variation in language are differentially affected by learning and production
  
  Keogh, A., Kirby, S., & Culbertson, J. (2024). Predictability and variation in language are differentially affected by learning and production. Cognitive Science, 48(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13435