This week, the GRCDI welcomed back Professor Inbal Arnon for a discussion of her recent paper in Science, “What Enables Human Language? A Biocultural Framework.”
Professor Arnon opened the session with a brief introduction to the paper and the journey behind its development, before inviting attendees into an in-depth discussion of the paper and its wider context. The following conversation ranged across language development, cultural transmission, and broader questions about cognition.
Events of this kind are central to the mission of the GRCDI. By bringing together researchers from across disciplines, these discussion focused sessions create a space for people to share and challenge ideas from one another, with the goal of sparking new research ideas across Diverse Intelligences.
Alongside the discussion event, Professor Arnon also met with GRCDI members in a series of one-to-one meetings, helping to foster new collaborations and deepen existing research connections with our members in St Andrews.
This visit builds on Professor Arnon’s previous trip to St Andrews in January 2026, where she delivered her talk, “Cultural evolution creates language-like structure: from humans to humpback whales and beyond.” The strong engagement and interest generated by that event led directly to this follow-up visit.
Prof. Arnon is a developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist (PhD, Stanford, 2011). She is a Full Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University, and currently a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on how children learn language, why they do so better than adults, and how studying language learning can help us understand how human language evolved to begin with. Prof. Arnon has worked extensively on first language learning, developing a novel framework for understanding why children are better language learners than adults, with applied implications for human and machine learning (The Starting Big Approach, see Arnon, 2021 for a review).