NWO Vidi Grant for Limor Raviv

27 October 2024
Limor Raviv
Limor Raviv has been awarded a Vidi Grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The Vidi Grant is for researchers who have carried out several years of postdoctoral research after their Phd and have demonstrated the ability to independently generate and effect innovative ideas.

Raviv was given the grant for her research project 'From Grunts to Grammars: Unpacking language evolution with humans and robots in virtual environment' at the Radboud University.

How and when did human language evolve? Why did humans invent languages that allow us to produce complex (and false) statements such as “I saw three blue elephants dancing in space”? Without a time-machine to travel to the past, these questions seem like an eternal mystery. But new technologies like Virtual Reality and Robotics can now help scientists discover, in the lab, how languages developed their potentially infinite expressive power. This project tests the social and environmental conditions that give rise to language by looking at how humans and robots create new communication systems in different virtual 3D worlds. 

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