Research Interests

• Language acquisition and language change
• Linguistic typology and universals
• Theoretical syntax and morphology
• Computational models of language learning and change
• Artificial language learning and grammaticality judgments

Recent Projects  please see my CV for comprehensive list of publications/talks related to each project.

Learning biases and typological universals of (morpho)syntax
This project (which began with my dissertation work) investigates the extent to which learning biases offer a possible explanation for typological universals in syntax and morphosyntax. The project uses an artificial language learning paradigm developed by Dr. Elissa Newport and colleagues.

• Culbertson, J., E. L. Newport. (2012). The role of word order and contiguity in the grammaticalization of case. Talk given at the 86th Annual LSA Meeting, Portland.
• Culbertson, J., P. Smolensky and G. Legendre. Statistical learning constrained by syntactic biases in an artificial language learning task. Talk given at BUCLD 36, November 2011.
• Culbertson, J. and P. Smolensky. (2011). Bayesian modeling of substantive biases for word order in an artificial language learning paradigm. Poster given at WCCFL 29, Tucson, Arizona.
• Culbertson, J., P. Smolensky and G. Legendre. (2011). Learning biases predict a word order universal. Cognition.
• Culbertson, J. and G. Legendre. (forthcoming). Investigating the evolution of agreement systems using an artificial language learning paradigm. In Proceedings of WECOL 2010.
• Culbertson, J. (2010). Learning biases, regularization, and the emergence of typological universals in syntax. Ph.D. Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

Clitic Doubling in Spoken French
This project investigates the evolving status of the Spoken French clitic system. Evidence from the use and prosody of clitic doubling constructions as well as other distributional and phonological features of the clitic suggest that French subject clitics are being reanalyzed as markers of subject-verb agreement.

• Culbertson, J. (2012). Factors affecting the use of impersonal 'il' in Spoken French: implications for change in the clitic system. Talk given at Negation and Clitics in Romance, Zürich.
• Culbertson, J. (2010). Covergent evidence for categorial change in French: from subject clitic to agreement marker. Language 86(1), 85-132.
• Culbertson, J., and G. Legendre. (2008). Qu'en est-il des clitiques sujet en français oral contemporain? In Proceedings of the 1er Congrès mondial de linguistique française. Paris, France.

Acquisition of French subject clitics & agreement morphology
I am currently involved in research with Dr. Géraldine Legendre and several other collaborators on an NSF-funded project to study how young French children learn subject pronouns and other markers of agreement morphology.

• Legendre, G., J. Culbertson, I. Barrière, T. Nazzi, and L. Goyet. (2010). Experimental and empirical evidence for the status and acquisition of subject clitics and agreement marking in adult and child Spoken French. In Torrens, V., Escobar, L., Gavarro, A., and Mangado, J., (Eds), Movement and Clitics. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Legendre, G., T. Nazzi, I. Barriere, J. Culbertson, M. Lopez-Gonzalez, and E. Zaroukian. (2006). Acquiring subject-verb agreement in French: Evidence of early syntactic representations from comprehension. In Caunt-Nulton, H., Kulatilake, S., and Woo, I. (eds.) Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 370-381.

Acceptability Judgments of Linguists vs. Non-linguistics
This project is a collaboration with Dr. Steven Gross at Johns Hopkins, aimed at addressing whether the acceptability judgments of training linguists are superior, in some sense, to judgments given by those with little or no linguistics training. 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.

• Gross, S. & J. Culbertson. (2011). Revisited Linguistic Intuitions. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62, 639-656.
• Culbertson, J., and S. Gross. (2009). Are Linguists Better Subjects?. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60, 721-736. Test sentences used in this paper are available [HERE]

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