معرفی
Professor Jennifer Culbertson is a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding how linguistic patterns emerge from cognitive biases and learning processes, particularly through experimental methods involving artificial language learning and computational modeling. She investigates typological universals, word order preferences, and morphological systems, emphasizing their cognitive and communicative foundations.
Her current research explores how speakers' cognitive representations of gender and number morphology influence cross-linguistic tendencies in morpheme order, as well as the interplay between communicative efficiency and social biases in language learning. She supervises PhD students in areas including experimental syntax, language evolution, and cognitive linguistics. Culbertson has published extensively in top journals such as Cognition, Language, and Cognitive Science.
Publications include studies on word order universals derived from silent gesture experiments, the role of simplicity in linguistic evolution, and experimental evidence for cognitive biases shaping morpheme order. Recent work (2024) highlights a universal bias in word order preferences even among speakers of non-harmonic languages.
