The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13)

The 13th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EvoLang13) was held in Brussels, Belgium from the 14th - 17th of April 2020, organised by Bart de Boer's research group at the Artifcial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. As always, the success of the event is, among other things, facilitated by the team effort and synergy of four bodies: the permanent committee, the local organizers, the scientific committee, and the panel of reviewers. The permanent committee (p.v), headed by Erica Cartimill and Simon Kirby, has always been keen to provide advice and support when needed. Many members of the permanent committee are our mentors or peers, and they keep making the world of language sciences a better place. The local organizers, Bart de Boer, Yannick Jadoul, Katie Mudd, Ross Towns, Marnix Van Soom, and myself have worked hard to make the conference possible. Kudos to this cohesive team for turning an 'EvoLang in Brussels' idea into reality. The scientific committee was in charge of editing and reviewing all contributed abstracts and papers. Once again, the EvoLang XIII scientific committee shows a strong involvement of early career researchers in the evolution of language community. The committee this year spanned several countries and institutions, featuring members at various stages including PhD, postdoc and early PI. By building on the expertise of existing members and recruiting new ones, we really tried to achieve diversity of scientific backgrounds. The fields and perspective covered by the scientific committee span, among other things: developmental psychology, scientific communication, classical linguistics, speech sciences, field research (both in humans and other species), cognitive neuroscience, gesture, artificial intelligence, computational modelling, genetics, anthropology, acoustics, and music cognition. This iteration of the conference received many high quality submissions, making the hard work of our reviewers (p.vi) especially important. Given the quality of submissions we received, the cutoff threshold for acceptance has been particularly high this year. This volume contains many contributions from various disciplines: syntax, semantics, speech sciences, (developmental) psychology, genetics, bioacoustics, anthropology, animal iii behaviour, and historical linguistics. The local organising committee, the reviewers, the scientific committee and the permanent committee all voluntarily contribute their time. Thanks to my fellow editors and committee members for bearing with me and acting in coordination to ensure we did the best possible job we could, considering our other commitments. EvoLang XIII in Brussels marks a number of firsts (we think) in the history of the conference. There is International Sign Language interpreting for one track of the parallel session and at plenary sessions. The pre-conference workshops take one full day, instead of half a day as before; more space needed for, and allocated to, this part of the conference which is organized bottom-up can be seen as a sign of maturity for the field. This edition, three members of the scientific committee are also among the local organizers, which has proved particularly useful for coordination and communication purposes. On a personal note, this edition marks my 10-years anniversary with the Language Evolution community. Ten years ago, I was a master student in a completely unrelated discipline attending EvoLang 8 in 2010 'just for fun' (to each their own); at this EvoLang in Utrecht I got to discover and fell in love with a fantastic field of study. Since then, it has been an honour and privilege to be welcomed and hopefully contribute to this wonderful community. I sincerely hope that you, a student passionate about language evolution who is reading this, will have fun organizing EvoLang in 2030!