Language Evolution and Cultural Change (LECC)
Max Planck Partner Group
Like biological organisms adapting to their ecological niches, languages adapt to the environments in which they are learned and used. These environments can be understood at two levels. On the cognitive side, the human mind, with its limited memory, attention, and processing capacity, places constraints on the forms that language can take and, over time, shapes its evolution. On the ecological side, the social and physical environments of speech communities—including population structure, patterns of social interaction, climate, and landscape—create different kinds of pressures that influence how languages develop and change.
By combining large-scale linguistic corpora with computational methods for quantifying language structure, the Partner Group investigates language evolution from both perspectives.
Its research focuses on two broad questions:
- How do linguistic structures adapt to cognitive constraints for efficient communication?
- How do social and physical environments give rise to different trajectories of language evolution?
Specific research topics include:
- The birth of new words
- How Chinese classifiers shape conceptual representation
- Changes in conceptual representation across the lifespan and historical time
- Cross-cultural alignment of emotion concepts
- The evolution of form–meaning mappings
The Partner Group began its work on 1 September 2026 and will run until 31 August 2031. The Group is headed by Ying Li, Associate Professor at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Dr. Li works in close collaboration with researchers at the Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC).
Biosketch
Dr. Ying Li is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research lies at the intersection of cognitive science and linguistics. He views language as a window into the human mind in two complementary ways: its content reveals what people think, feel, and value, while its structure reflects the cognitive mechanisms that support learning, processing, and communication. His research therefore develops along two main themes.
Theme 1: Cognitive constraints shape language evolution
Li investigates how languages adapt to the constraints of the human cognitive system. From an evolutionary perspective, linguistic forms can be understood as competing and changing under selection pressures imposed by limited memory, attention, and processing capacity. His work asks how these pressures shape linguistic structure over time and whether the striking diversity of the world's languages nevertheless reflects a shared set of constraints rooted in human cognition.
Theme 2: Language content as a window into psychological and cultural change
Li also studies how language reflects psychological and cultural change. Linguistic expressions can provide traces of collective psychological phenomena such as prejudice, optimism, emotions, and social attitudes, therefore, making it possible to examine how these patterns change over historical time.
Dr. Li is also the creator of the Macroscope (http://macroscope.intelligence-media.com/), an online tool for exploring and visualizing historical changes in the meanings of English words over the past 200 years.
Selected Publications
Li, Y., Zhao, W. J., Luan, S., Lin, Z., Fang, J., Shenzhang, C., Chen, M., & Hills, T. (in press). Older yet faster: Representational development explains accelerated semantic processing in older adults. Psychological Review.
Li, Y., Breithaupt, F., Hills, T., Lin, Z., Chen, Y., Siew, C. S., & Hertwig, R. (2024). How cognitive selection affects language change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(1), e2220898120.
Li, Y., & Siew, C. S. (2022). Diachronic semantic change in language is constrained by how people use and learn language. Memory & cognition, 1-15.
Li, Y., & Hills, T. (2021). Language patterns of outgroup prejudice. Cognition, 215, 104813.
Li, Y., Masitah, A., & Hills, T. T. (2020). The Emotional Recall Task: Juxtaposing recall and recognition-based affect scales. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46, 1782–1794.
Li, Y., Hills, T.T, & Hertwig, R. (2020). A brief history of risk. Cognition, 203,104344.
Li, Y., Engelthaler, T., Siew, C. S., & Hills, T. T. (2019). The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language. Behavior Research Methods, 51, 1864–1877.