She is a founding member of the Centre for Language Evolution,[1] with her research focusing on how typological universals are shaped by properties of human cognition.
[2] Culbertson is best known for her work investigating universals of word order and morphological categories using the experimental method of Artificial Language Learning.
She was chosen for the Young Academy of Europe in 2019,[1][4] She is a member of the Cognitive Science Society, and was a co-chair of the 2022 Toronto conference.
Cross-linguistically, the most common order of these elements is one that is homomorphic - containing the adjective closest to the noun, followed by the number and then the determiner.
[6] Possible explanations behind this tendency have been debated, ranging from historical accidents (Dunn et al., 2011[7]) to language change processes unrelated to cognition (Bybee, 2008[8]).