Research and publications

I currently work in the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology (CCP) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where I provide statistical advice and assistance researchers at all levels.

Between joining CPP in 2020 and completing my PhD at the University of Adelaide in 2011 (under the supervision of Danielle Navarro and Andrew Perfors), I worked in various institutions around the world applying mathematical and computational modelling techniques to questions around human cognition, culture and language, particularly from an evolutionary perspective. I've been associated with the Department of Linguistics and Philology at the University of Uppsala, the BEDLAN project at the University of Turku, the Language, Cognition and Culture Lab at the University of Auckland and the Computational Cognitive Science Lab, then at UC Berkeley, now at Princeton.

Publications

• Maurits, L., de Heer, M., Honkolta, T., Dunn, M., Vesakoski, O. (under review) Best practices in justifying calibrations for dating language families. Journal of Language Evolution.
• Maurits, L., Forkel, R., Kaiping, G. A., Atkinson, Q. D. (2017) BEASTling: A software tool for linguistic phylogenetics using BEAST 2. PLOS ONE.
• Maurits, L. & Griffiths, T. (2014). Tracing the roots of syntax with Bayesian phylogenetics. PNAS (supporting information, webpage)
• Whalen, A., Maurits, L., Pacer, M., Griffiths, T. L. (2014) Cultural evolution with sparse testimony: When does the cultural ratchet slip?. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
• Maurits, L. & Griffiths, T. (2012). Connecting input filtering and selection in language evolution [Abstract] (note that this is not a refereed publication). In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 2779). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
• Maurits, L., Perfors, A., Navarro, D. (2010) Why are some word orders more common than others? A uniform information density account. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 23 (pp. 1585-1593). (supplementary material)
• Maurits, L., Perfors, A., Navarro, D. (2009) Joint acquisition of word order and word reference. In N.A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1728-1733). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society

Presentations

• Maurits, L., Perfors, A., Navarro, D. Mutual constraint in Bayesian learning of word reference and word meaning. Presented by me at the Australian Mathematical Psychology Conference 2009.