Jennifer Culbertson

Jennifer Culbertson
Title	Professor
Website	https://jennifer-culbertson.github.io/

Jennifer Culbertson is a Professor in the department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She is a founding member of the Centre for Language Evolution, with her researching focusing on how typological universals are shaped by properties of human cognition. Culbertson is best known for her work investigating universals of word order and morphological categories using the experimental method of Artificial Language Learning.

Key Publications

• A universal cognitive bias in word order: Evidence from speakers whose language goes against it. Martin, A., Adger, D., Abels, K., Kanampiu, P., & Culbertson, J. Psychological science. 2024.
• Artificial language learning. Culbertson, J. In Sprouse, J., editor(s), Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2023.
• Learning biases predict a word order universal. Culbertson, J., Smolensky, P., & Legendre, G. Cognition, 122: 306-329. 2012.
• Word-minimality, epenthesis and coda licensing in the early acquisition of English. Demuth, K., Culbertson, J., & Alter, J. Language and Speech, 49(2): 137-174. 2006.
• Cross-linguistic patterns of morpheme order reflect cognitive biases: An experimental study of case and number morphology. Saldana, C., Oseki, Y., & Culbertson, J. Journal of Memory and Language, 118: 104204. 2021.
• Does a universal hierarchical structure underlie word order typology?. Martin, A., Kanampiu, P., Adger, D., Abels, K., & Culbertson, J. In Ravignani, A., Barbieri, C., Flaherty, M., Jadoul, Y., Lattenkamp, E., Little, H., Martins, M., Mudd, K., & Verhoef, T., editor(s), Proceedings of EVOLANG 13. 2020.
• From the world to word order: deriving biases in noun phrase order from statistical properties of the world. Culbertson, J., Schouwstra, M., & Kirby, S. Language, 96(3). 2020.