Jennifer Culbertson
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 789912 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jennifer Culbertson |
| NOMBRES | Jennifer |
| APELLIDO | Culbertson |
| FIRMA | CULBERTSON J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1737-6296 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 80 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Domain-general categorisation explains constrained cross-linguistic variation in noun classification
Languages appear limited in the range of concepts that are grammatically encoded. For example, person, number, and animacy distinctions are regularly found in e.g., grammatical agreement systems. But, despite their visual salience, colour distinctions are completely absent from such systems. Some have taken this to indicate domain-specific constraints on what can and cannot be part of grammars. Here, we test an alternative possibility, that domai…
The lexicon adapts to competing communicative pressures
Cross-linguistically, lexicons tend to be more phonetically clustered than required by the phonotactics of the language; that is, words within a language are more similar to each other than they need to be. In this study, we investigate how this property evolves under the influence of competing communicative pressures: a production-side pressure to re-use more easily articulated sounds, and a comprehension-side pressure for distinctiveness of wor…
Linguistic Rule Generalisation Creates the Same Distributional Structure That Feeds It
Part of language’s great expressivity comes from its users creating new forms by applying familiar rules to novel items. But linguistic rules aren’t all created equal—some are more readily generalisable than others. In this paper, we focus on how rule generalisation is affected by certain properties of frequency distributions. In an artificial language learning experiment that asks adult learners to generalise using one of two suffixes, we find t…
Semantic and morphophonological productivity in the Kîîtharaka gender system
Nominal classification systems are characterized by diverse and sometimes complex gender assignment rules that interact in dynamic ways. The specifics of how gender assignment works can vary widely from language to language. Nominal classification systems of Bantu languages in particular have been the subject of long-standing debate. Traditional accounts of gender assignment are based principally on abstract semantic features which have been foun…
Evidence for word order harmony between abstract categories in silent gesture
Cross-category harmony is the tendency for languages to use consistent orders of heads and dependents across different types of phrases. For example, languages tend to either place both verbs and adpositions before their dependents (e.g., 'seethe girl', 'tothe store' as in English) or after (e.g., 'the girlsee', 'the storeto' as in Turkish). Harmony has been argued to reflect a cognitive bias for simpler rules: a single high level abstract rule i…
Communicative pressures shape language during communication (not learning)
Natural languages seem to be designed for efficient communication. A classic example is Differential Case Marking, when nouns are marked for their grammatical role only if this information cannot be derived from world knowledge (e.g. only atypical objects need to be linguistically marked as objects). Fedzechkina et al. (2012) present experimental evidence from an artificial language learning paradigm suggesting that biases in learning favour Diff…
The learning bias for cross-category harmony is sensitive to semantic similarity
Gender Comes First
Morphosyntactic expression exhibits significant crosslinguistic variation, yet systematic tendencies emerge. Gender and number features are frequently coexpressed within a single exponent, and when they are realized separately, gender morphology tends to surface closer to the stem. Competing theoretical accounts of gender and number seek to explain these tendencies, but empirical validation remains challenging due to sparse typological data. Acro…
With or Without a System
Certain recurrent features of language characterize the way a whole language system is structured. By contrast, others target specific categories of items within those wider systems. For example, languages tend to exhibit consistent order of heads and dependents across different phrases—a system‐wide regularity known as harmony. While this tendency is generally robust, some specific syntactic categories appear to deviate from the trend. We examin…
The learning bias for cross-category harmony is sensitive to semantic similarity
Cross-category harmony is one of the most well-known typological universals. It describes a trend of consistent alignment of different syntactic categories across phrases within a language. Explanations for this universal vary as to whether cognitive factors play a role or the tendency is instead due to mechanisms of language change alone. In this article we report a series of artificial language learning experiments that aim to test a hypothesiz…
Order shaped by cognition. Evidence for (and against) the effect of domain-general biases on word and morpheme order
A foundational goal of linguistics has been to understand why languages look the way they do. A range of possible explanations exist – from domain-specific representations to cognition-external factors like history and grammaticalization – and all of these undoubtedly play some role. But determining exactly how these link with specific features of language remains challenging, and the role of domain-specific mechanisms has been particularly conte…
You say yes, I say no
Response particles, like English ‘yes’ and ‘no’, are used to respond to polar questions or assertions and are found in all languages. However, the number of particles and the specific meanings they convey vary across languages. For example, in some languages particles mainly convey whether the response itself is positive or negative, while in others they convey whether the response is agreeing or disagreeing with previous discourse. Further, some…
Is Regularization Uniform across Linguistic Levels? Comparing Learning and Production of Unconditioned Probabilistic Variation in Morphology and Word Order
Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it – removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use on context. Previous studies using artificial language learning experiments have documented regularizi…
Cross-linguistic patterns of morpheme order reflect cognitive biases
A foundational goal of linguistics is to investigate whether shared features of the human cognitive system can explain how linguistic patterns are distributed across languages. In this paper we report a series of artificial language learning experiments which aim to test a hypothesised link between cognition and a persistent regularity of morpheme order: number morphemes (e.g., plural markers) tend to be ordered closer to noun stems than case mor…
Cue reliability, salience and early comprehension of agreement
Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-ye…
Nobody Doesn't Like Negative Concord
Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of its negative marker (Zeijlstra 2004; Jespersen 1917). For example, one version of this hypothesis arg…
Experimental evidence for the influence of structure and meaning on linear order in the noun phrase
Recent work has used artificial language experiments to argue that hierarchical representations drive learners’ expectations about word order in complex noun phrases like these two green cars (Culbertson & Adger 2014; Martin, Ratitamkul, et al. 2019). When trained on a novel language in which individual modifiers come after the Noun, English speakers overwhelmingly assume that multiple nominal modifiers should be ordered such that Adjectives come…
Simplicity and informativeness in semantic category systems
A learning bias for word order harmony
Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments repor…
Person of Interest
Person systems convey the roles entities play in the context of speech (e.g., speaker, addressee). As with other linguistic category systems, not all ways of partitioning the person space are equally likely crosslinguistically. Different theories have been proposed to constrain the set of possible person partitions that humans can represent, explaining their typological distribution. This article introduces an artificial language learning methodo…
From the world to word order
The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun ph…
Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase
Noun phrase word order varies cross-linguistically, however, two distributional asymmetries have attracted substantial attention. First, the most common orders place adjectives closest to the noun, then numerals, then demonstratives (e.g., N-Adj-Num-Dem). Second, exceptions to this are restricted to post-nominal position (e.g., N-Dem-Num-Adj, but not, for instance, Adj-Num-Dem-N). These observations have been argued to reflect constraints on cogn…
Artificial Language Learning in Children
Artificial language learning methods—in which learners are taught miniature constructed languages in a controlled laboratory setting—have become a valuable experimental tool for research on language development. These methods offer a complement to natural language acquisition data, allowing researchers to control both the input to learning and the learning environment. A large proportion of artificial language learning studies has aimed to unders…
Children’s Sensitivity to Phonological and Semantic Cues During Noun Class Learning
Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g. grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonologic…
Children's sensitivity to phonological and semantic cues during noun class learning
Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g. grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonologic…
Convergent evidence for categorial change in French
The status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated (Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Miller & Sag 1997, De Cat 2007b, and many others). Distributional properties of French subject clitics have led Kayne (1975), Rizzi (1986), and others to analyze them as argument-bearing elements occupying canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of the phonology. While this hypothesis enjoys a wide fol…
Word-minimality, Epenthesis and Coda Licensing in the Early Acquisition of English
Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced. This paper evaluates this proposal by examining the development of word-final coda consonants in the s…
Are Linguists Better Subjects
Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show …
Competition between phonological and semantic cues in noun class learning
From the world to word order
The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun ph…
Typological Universals as Reflections of Biased Learning
The study of language typology has played a critical role in revealing potential constraints on possible linguistic systems. Such constraints, often called "typological universals" have long been used to support a foundational premise of generative linguistics-that languages share a set of underlying commonalities. However, recent research has challenged the idea that typological universals-which (at least on the surface) are often statistical te…
Revisited Linguistic Intuitions
Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues that, insofar as linguists possess better theories about language than non-linguists, their linguistic intuitions are more reliable. (Culbertson and Gross [2009]) presented empirical evidence contrary to this claim. Devitt ([2010]) replies that, in part because we overemphasize the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality, we misunderstand linguists’ claims, fall into inconsistency, and fail to…
Nobody Doesn't Like Negative Concord
Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of its negative marker (Zeijlstra 2004; Jespersen 1917). For example, one version of this hypothesis arg…
Artificial Language Learning in Children
Artificial language learning methods—in which learners are taught miniature constructed languages in a controlled laboratory setting—have become a valuable experimental tool for research on language development. These methods offer a complement to natural language acquisition data, allowing researchers to control both the input to learning and the learning environment. A large proportion of artificial language learning studies has aimed to unders…
Children's sensitivity to phonological and semantic cues during noun class learning
Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g. grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonologic…
Is children's comprehension of subject-verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish
The learning bias for cross-category harmony is sensitive to semantic similarity
Cross-category harmony is one of the most well-known typological universals. It describes a trend of consistent alignment of different syntactic categories across phrases within a language. Explanations for this universal vary as to whether cognitive factors play a role or the tendency is instead due to mechanisms of language change alone. In this article we report a series of artificial language learning experiments that aim to test a hypothesiz…
Competing models of liaison acquisition
Given that nouns rarely appear in isolation in French, infants acquiring the language must often retrieve the underlying representation of vowel-initial lexical forms from liaison contexts that provide conflicting information about the initial phoneme. Given this ambiguity, how do learners represent these nouns in their lexicons, and how do these representations change as learners’ knowledge of liaison and the lexicon become more adult-like? To e…
Developing knowledge of nonadjacent dependencies
Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies-relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve multiple levels of representation and abstraction, built up as infants gain experience with their nat…
Word-minimality, Epenthesis and Coda Licensing in the Early Acquisition of English
Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced. This paper evaluates this proposal by examining the development of word-final coda consonants in the s…
Are Linguists Better Subjects
Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show …
Convergent evidence for categorial change in French
The status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated (Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Miller & Sag 1997, De Cat 2007b, and many others). Distributional properties of French subject clitics have led Kayne (1975), Rizzi (1986), and others to analyze them as argument-bearing elements occupying canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of the phonology. While this hypothesis enjoys a wide fol…
Revisited Linguistic Intuitions
Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues that, insofar as linguists possess better theories about language than non-linguists, their linguistic intuitions are more reliable. (Culbertson and Gross [2009]) presented empirical evidence contrary to this claim. Devitt ([2010]) replies that, in part because we overemphasize the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality, we misunderstand linguists’ claims, fall into inconsistency, and fail to…
Learning biases predict a word order universal
Typological Universals as Reflections of Biased Learning
The study of language typology has played a critical role in revealing potential constraints on possible linguistic systems. Such constraints, often called "typological universals" have long been used to support a foundational premise of generative linguistics-that languages share a set of underlying commonalities. However, recent research has challenged the idea that typological universals-which (at least on the surface) are often statistical te…
Is children's comprehension of subject-verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish
Developing knowledge of nonadjacent dependencies
Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies-relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve multiple levels of representation and abstraction, built up as infants gain experience with their nat…
Competition between phonological and semantic cues in noun class learning
Competing models of liaison acquisition
Given that nouns rarely appear in isolation in French, infants acquiring the language must often retrieve the underlying representation of vowel-initial lexical forms from liaison contexts that provide conflicting information about the initial phoneme. Given this ambiguity, how do learners represent these nouns in their lexicons, and how do these representations change as learners’ knowledge of liaison and the lexicon become more adult-like? To e…
Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase
Noun phrase word order varies cross-linguistically, however, two distributional asymmetries have attracted substantial attention. First, the most common orders place adjectives closest to the noun, then numerals, then demonstratives (e.g., N-Adj-Num-Dem). Second, exceptions to this are restricted to post-nominal position (e.g., N-Dem-Num-Adj, but not, for instance, Adj-Num-Dem-N). These observations have been argued to reflect constraints on cogn…
Artificial Language Learning in Children
Artificial language learning methods—in which learners are taught miniature constructed languages in a controlled laboratory setting—have become a valuable experimental tool for research on language development. These methods offer a complement to natural language acquisition data, allowing researchers to control both the input to learning and the learning environment. A large proportion of artificial language learning studies has aimed to unders…
Children’s Sensitivity to Phonological and Semantic Cues During Noun Class Learning
Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g. grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonologic…
Children's sensitivity to phonological and semantic cues during noun class learning
Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g. grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonologic…
Experimental evidence for the influence of structure and meaning on linear order in the noun phrase
Recent work has used artificial language experiments to argue that hierarchical representations drive learners’ expectations about word order in complex noun phrases like these two green cars (Culbertson & Adger 2014; Martin, Ratitamkul, et al. 2019). When trained on a novel language in which individual modifiers come after the Noun, English speakers overwhelmingly assume that multiple nominal modifiers should be ordered such that Adjectives come…
Simplicity and informativeness in semantic category systems
A learning bias for word order harmony
Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments repor…
Person of Interest
Person systems convey the roles entities play in the context of speech (e.g., speaker, addressee). As with other linguistic category systems, not all ways of partitioning the person space are equally likely crosslinguistically. Different theories have been proposed to constrain the set of possible person partitions that humans can represent, explaining their typological distribution. This article introduces an artificial language learning methodo…
From the world to word order
The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun ph…
Is Regularization Uniform across Linguistic Levels? Comparing Learning and Production of Unconditioned Probabilistic Variation in Morphology and Word Order
Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it – removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use on context. Previous studies using artificial language learning experiments have documented regularizi…
Cross-linguistic patterns of morpheme order reflect cognitive biases
A foundational goal of linguistics is to investigate whether shared features of the human cognitive system can explain how linguistic patterns are distributed across languages. In this paper we report a series of artificial language learning experiments which aim to test a hypothesised link between cognition and a persistent regularity of morpheme order: number morphemes (e.g., plural markers) tend to be ordered closer to noun stems than case mor…
Cue reliability, salience and early comprehension of agreement
Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-ye…
Nobody Doesn't Like Negative Concord
Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of its negative marker (Zeijlstra 2004; Jespersen 1917). For example, one version of this hypothesis arg…
You say yes, I say no
Response particles, like English ‘yes’ and ‘no’, are used to respond to polar questions or assertions and are found in all languages. However, the number of particles and the specific meanings they convey vary across languages. For example, in some languages particles mainly convey whether the response itself is positive or negative, while in others they convey whether the response is agreeing or disagreeing with previous discourse. Further, some…
Order shaped by cognition. Evidence for (and against) the effect of domain-general biases on word and morpheme order
A foundational goal of linguistics has been to understand why languages look the way they do. A range of possible explanations exist – from domain-specific representations to cognition-external factors like history and grammaticalization – and all of these undoubtedly play some role. But determining exactly how these link with specific features of language remains challenging, and the role of domain-specific mechanisms has been particularly conte…
Linguistics (28 obras) · Psychology (26 obras) · Computer Science (20 obras) · Philosophy (17 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (16 obras) · Cognitive psychology (14 obras) · Noun (12 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (11 obras) · Cognition (11 obras) · Language and cultural evolution (11 obras)