Cedric Boeckx

Cedric Boeckx

Universitat de Barcelona

Humanities

Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), a member of the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS), and a member of the section of General Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona. Before joining ICREA, he was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006), Bare Syntax (2008), Language in Cognition (2009), Syntactic Islands (2012), Elementary Syntactic Structures (2014), Reflections on Language Evolution (2021), and the editor of numerous volumes. He serves as Principal Investigator of the "Cognitive Biology of Language" research group.

Research interests

My current research focuses on developing new ways to shed light on the neurobiological foundations of the human language faculty. My graduate training and early career were in theoretical linguistics, but my more recent work has a more explicit biological, and experimental orientation. My current projects are all intended to facilitate integration among disciplines (linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and genetics), and lead to better experimental testing of theoretical hypotheses, as well as to more solid interpretations of experimental findings. I also seek to exploit the full pluralism characteristic of the life sciences to force a rethinking of long-held assumptions in theoretical linguistics and other domains of cognitive science.  

Selected publications

- Raviv L, Peckre LR & Boeckx C 2022, 'What Is Simple Is Actually Quite Complex: A critical note on terminology in the domain of language and communication', Journal Of Comparative Psychology, 136(4):215-220.

- Eusebi PG, Sevane N, O'Rourke T, Pizarro M, Boeckx C & Dunner S 2022, 'Age Effects Aggressive Behavior: RNA-Seq Analysis in Cattle with Implications for Studying Neoteny Under Domestication', Behavior Genetics, 52(2):141-153.

- Dutto I, Gerhards J, Herrera A, et al. 2022, 'Pathway-specific effects of ADSL deficiency on neurodevelopment', Elife, 11, e70518.

- Buisan R, Moriano J, Andirkó A & Boeckx C 2022, 'A brain region-specific expression profile for genes within large introgression deserts and under positive selection in Homo sapiens', Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology 10:824740. 

- Andirkó A & Boeckx C 2022, 'Brain region-specific effects of nearly fixed sapiens-derived allelesBMC Genomic Data 23(1):36.

- Theofanopoulou C, Andirkó A, Boeckx C & Jarvis ED 2022, 'Oxytocin and vasotocin receptor variation and the evolution of human prosociality', Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology 11:100139.

- Andirkó A, Moriano J, Vitriolo A, Kuhlwilm M, Testa G & Boeckx C 2022, 'Fine-grained temporal mapping of derived high-frequency variants supports the mosaic nature of the evolution of Homo sapiensScientific Reports, 12(1):9937.

- Asano R, Boeckx C & Fujita K 2022, 'Moving beyond domain-specific versus domain-general options in cognitive neuroscience', Cortex, 154:259-268.