Affiliation: University of Edinburgh, UK
Keywords: Experimental linguistics, Syntax, Morphology, Language evolution, Language acquisition
Full profile:
Jennifer Culbertson obtained her PhD in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2010. Her dissertation was awarded the Robert J. Glushko Prize for Outstanding Dissertations in Cognitive Science in 2011. In 2014 she took up a Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, and was promoted to Reader in 2018. She is a founding member of the Centre for Language Evolution at Edinburgh. Her research has been supported by over €2 million in funding from the ESRC and ERC (including an ERC Starting Grant). She was selected for the Young Academy of Europe in 2019.
Research interests:
Her main area of research is linguistics, specifically grammatical structures (like word order) and morphological categories (like gender and person systems). She uses experimental and computational tools to investigate how these key features of language are shaped by properties of the human cognitive system through learning and use.