research.

For my PhD thesis, Kinship terminology adapts for efficient communication at multiple levels of linguistic structure, I am using a combination of computational models, behavioural experiments, and phylogenetic analyses to study:

• common patterns in how family relationships are categorised across the world's languages,


• how these patterns support efficient communication at the structural and semantic level,


• and how the design of semantic category systems reflects an adaptation to the cultural evolution of language.

To learn more, have a look at my ongoing research projects.

publications.

Hallam, M., Jordan, F.M., Kirby, S., and Smith, K. (in press) Predictive structure emerges during generalisation of kin terms to new referents. Open Mind [view preprint here]

Hallam, M., Kirby, S., Jordan, F.M., and Smith, K. (2025) Efficient communication drives the semantic structure of kinship terminology. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47.

Hallam, M., Jordan, F.M., Kirby, S., and Smith, K. (2024) Systemic structure of kinship is shaped by evolutionary processes. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46.

Hallam, M., Jordan, F. M., Kirby, S. & Smith, K. (2024). Systemic structure of kinship is shaped by evolutionary processes. In Nölle, J., Raviv, L., ... & Watson, S. (Eds.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (Evolang XV). doi:10.17617/2.3587960.

presentations.

talks.

Hierarchical structure of kinship semantics derives from efficient communication principles at Protolang 9 (2025)

Variation in the kin term lexicon is not predicted by population structure at the Cultural Evolution Society Conference (2024) [view slides]

Systemic structure of kinship is shaped by evolutionary processes at The International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XV) (2024) [view slides]

posters.

Efficient communication drives the semantic structure of kinship terminology at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2025) [view poster]

Systemic structure of kinship is shaped by evolutionary processes at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2024) [view poster]

The origins of cross-cultural patterns in kinship systems at Harvard Women in Psychology Trends in Psychology (2021)

Why do you have two grandmothers but only one mother? at the Linguistics and English Language Postgraduate Conference (2021)

teaching.

lecturing.

Evolution and Human Behaviour

University of Bristol, 2025

I created and held a guest lecture on the biological and cultural evolution of language, and how we can study language evolution in the lab.

workshops.

Time-travelling with statistics: an introduction to phylogenetic comparative methods for linguists

University of Edinburgh, 2024

I gave a seminar on the importance of controlling for language relatedness in typological analyses, and a crash-course on how to run phylogenetic analyses using R.

tutoring.

Online Experiments for Language Scientists

University of Edinburgh, 2022-2025

Honours and Masters-level course on designing and building web-based experiments.

Origins and Evolution of Language

University of Edinburgh, 2022-2024

Honours and Masters-level course on current research in language evolution.

PPLS Writing Centre

University of Edinburgh, 2022-2023

A resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students to improve their research through one-on-one tuition.

Introduction to Python

University of Edinburgh, 2022

Short course for undergraduate and postgraduate students on the basics of programming in Python.