Professor Ben Ambridge, Psychology, University of Manchester
ACCLAIM Band Books Blog Observer column ERC CLASS Manchester
Submitted and Registered Reports
Kolak, J., Vihman, V., Engelmann, F., Granlund, S., Theakston, A.L., Lieven, E.V.M., Pine, J.M., Fazekas, J. & Ambridge, B. (under revision). Why learners privilege word-order over case-marking: A cross-linguistic meta-analysis, new data from Estonian, Finnish and Polish, and a discriminative learning model. Psychological Review. [OSF Preprint]
Blything, R., Theakston, A.L., Brandt, S. & Ambridge, B. (under revision). Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain 'binding-principle' constraints on pronoun interpretation: Evidence from nine pre-registered rating studies. Cognitive Psychology. [OSF Preprint]
Fazekas, J., Blything. L. & Ambridge, B. (under revision). No surprises: Strong evidence against a prime-surprisal effect from a large pre-registered study with 42 different operationalizations of prime-surprisal. Journal of Memory and Language . [OSF Preprint]
Samara, A., Wonnacott, E., Saxena, G., Maitreyee, R., Fazekas, J. & Ambridge, B. (in press). Learners restrict their linguistic generalizations using preemption but not entrenchment: Evidence from artificial-language-learning studies with adults and children Psychological Review. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000463. OSF Preprint
Ambridge, B., Tatsumi, T., Saito, M., Bannard, C. & Jones, S.D. (accepted in principle). Who did what to whom in Japanese? How do children learn to mark participant roles in basic sentences? Developmental Science. [registered report]
Published and In Press
Ambridge, B. (2024). Child Language Acquisition. In Frank, M.C., & Majid, A. MIT Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
Ambridge, B., Arnon, I. & Bekman, D. (2023). He was run-over by a bus. Passive, but not pseudo-passive, sentences are rated as more acceptable when the subject is highly affected. New data from Hebrew, and a meta-analytic synthesis across English, Balinese, Hebrew, Indonesian and Mandarin. Glossa: Psycholinguistics. [https://doi.org/10.5070/G6011177]
Maitreyee, R., Saxena, G., Narasimhan, B., Sharma, D.M., Mishra, P., Nair, R.B., Samanta, S. & Ambridge, B. (2023). Children learn ergative case marking in Hindi using statistical preemption and clause-level semantics (intentionality): evidence from acceptability judgment and elicited production studies with children and adults. Open Research Europe, 3(49) https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.15611.2
Ambridge, B., Doherty, L., Maitreyee, R., Tatsumi, T., Zicherman, S., Mateo-Pedro, P., Kawakami, A., Bidgood, A., Pye, C., Narasimhan, B., Arnon, I., Bekman, D., Efrati, A., Pixabaj, S.F.C, Peliz, M.M., & Mendoza, M.J, Samanta, S., Campbell, S., McCauley, S., Berman, R., Sharma, D.M., Nair, R.B. & Fukumura, K (2022). Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and Kiche, Open Research Europe, 1(1) https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13008.1
Ambridge, B. (2022). Why Algebraic systems aren't sufficient for syntax: Experimental evidence from passives in English, Mandarin, Indonesian, Balinese and Hebrew. In S. Lappin & J-P. Bernardy (Eds)Algebraic Structures in Natural Language . [pdf]
Darmasetiyawan, I.M.S. & Ambridge, B. (2022). Syntactic representations contain semantic information: Evidence from Balinese passives. Collabra: Psychology, 8(1), 33133. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.33133 [open access]
Darmasetiyawan, I.M.S., Messenger, K. & Ambridge, B. (2022). Is Passive priming really impervious to verb semantics? A high-powered replication of Messenger et al. (2012). Collabra: Psychology, 8(1), 31055. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.31055 [open access]
Ambridge, B. & Wagner, L. (2021). Testable theories of core first language acquisition (Introduction to the Special Issue on Testable theories of core first language acquisition). Journal of Child Language, 48(5), 859-861. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000921000581 [open access]
McCauley, S., Bannard, C., Theakston, A.L., Davis, M., Cameron-Faulkner, T., & Ambridge, B. (2021). Multiword units lead to errors of commission in children's spontaneous production: 'What corpus data can tell us?' Developmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13125 [open access]
Pimental, T., Ryskina, M., Mielke, Wu, S., Chodroff, E., Leonard, B...Ambridge, B. & Vylomova, E. (2021). SIGMORPHON 2021 Shared task on morphological reinflection: Generalization across languages. In Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON workshop on computational research in phonetics, phonology, and morphology. Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 229-259). DOI: 10.18653/v1/2021.sigmorphon-1.25 [open access]
Jones, S.D., Dooley, M. & Ambridge, B. (2021). Passive sentence reversal errors in autism: Replicating Ambridge, Bidgood, and Thomas (2020). Language Development Research. https://doi.org/10.34842/g1zk-3715 [open access]
Ambridge, B. (2021). Crazy New Idea: A Computational simulation of childrens language acquisition. In 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2021) (pp. 4.1-4.3). Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Zentrum fur Informatik. doi: 10.4230/OASIcs.LDK.2021.4 [open access]
Bidgood A., Pine, J.M., Rowland, C.F., Sala, G., Freudenthal, D.T. & Ambridge, B. (2021). Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: Grammaticality judgments, production priming and a meta-analytic synthesis. Language and Cognition, 13 (3), 397-437. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2021.8
Aryawibawa, I.N., Qomariana, Y., Artawa, K., & Ambridge, B. (2021). Direct versus indirect causation as a semantic linguistic universal: Using a computational model of English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and Kiche Mayan to predict grammaticality judgments in Balinese. Cognitive Science, 45(4),e12974 https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12974 [open access]
Liu, L. & Ambridge, B. (2021). Balancing information-structure and semantic constraints on construction choice: building a computational model of passive and passive-like constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(3), 349-388.https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2019-0100 [open access]
Ambridge, B, Bidgood, A. & Thomas, K. (2021). Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD: Elicited production of passives. Journal of Child Language, 48(1): 184-201 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000920000215. [open access]
Ambridge, B. (2021). Language Development Research editorial: Why do we need another journal? Language Development Research, https://doi.org/10.34842/yxh6-kz16 [open access]
Ambridge, B., Maitreyee, R., Tatsumi, T., Doherty, L., Zicherman, S., Mateo-Pedro, P., Bannard, C., Samanta, S., McCauley, S., Arnon, I., Bekman, D., Efrati, A., Berman, R. Narasimhan, B., Sharma, D.M., Nair, R.B., Fukumura, K., Campbell, S., Pye, C., Pixabaj, S.F.C, Peliz, M.M., & Mendoza, M.J., (2020). The Crosslinguistic acquisition of causative sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and Kiche, Cognition, 202,104301, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104310 [open access] [stimuli, data, code]
Bidgood A., Rowland, C.F., Pine, J.M. & Ambridge, B. (2020). Syntactic representations are both abstract and semantically constrained: Evidence from children's and adults' comprehension and production/priming of the English passive. Cognitive Science, 44(9), ee12892 https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12892 [open access]
Ambridge, B. (2020). Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition. First Language, 40(5-6), 509-559 https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723719869731 [open access]
Ambridge, B. (2020). Abstractions made of exemplars or You're all right and I've changed my mind. Response to commentators. First Language, 40(5-6), 640-659 https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723720949723 [open access]
Ambridge, B, Rowland, C.F., & Gummery, A. (2020). Teaching the unlearnable: A training study of complex yes/no questions Language and Cognition, 12(2): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2020.5 [open access]
Ambridge, B. & Ambridge, C. (2020). The retreat from transitive-causative overgeneralization errors: A review and diary study. In Rowland, C., Theakston, A., Ambridge, B., & Twomey, K. (Eds). Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn. John Benjamins. (pp.113-130). https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.05amb. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Rowland, C., Theakston, A. & Twomey, K. (2020). Introduction. In Rowland, C., Theakston, A., Ambridge, B., & Twomey, K. (Eds). Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn. John Benjamins. (pp.1-7). https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.int.
Engelmann, F., Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Zreder, M., Ambridge, B., Pine, J.M., Theakston, A.L., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2019). How the input shapes the acquisition of verb morphology: Elicited production and computational modelling in two highly inflected languages. Cognitive Psychology, 110 30-69 [open access]
Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Vihman, V., Engelmann, F., Lieven, E.V.M., Pine, J.M., Theakston, A.L. & Ambridge, B. (2019). Language-general and language-specific phenomena in the acquisition of inflectional noun morphology: A cross-linguistic elicited production study of Polish, Finnish and Estonian. Journal of Memory and Language, 107 169-194 [open access]
Sassenhagen, J., Blything, R.B., Lieven, E.V.M., & Ambridge, B. (2019). Frequency sensitivity of neural responses to English (in)transitive verb argument structure violations. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 38 [open access]
Aryawibawa, I.N & Ambridge, B. (2019). Is syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from a grammaticality judgment study of Indonesian. Cognitive Science, 42(8), 3135-3148 [OSF]
Ambridge, B., Barak, L., Wonnacott, E., Bannard, C., & Sala, G. (2018). Effects of both preemption and entrenchment in the retreat from verb overgeneralization errors: Four reanalyses, an extended replication, and a meta-Analytic synthesis. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 23. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.133 [open access]
Tatsumi, T., Ambridge, B., & Pine, J. M. (2018). Testing an input-based account of children's errors with inflectional morphology: An elicited production study of Japanese. Journal of Child Language, 45(5), 1144-1173. [Open Access]
Tatsumi, T., Ambridge, B., & Pine, J. M. (2018). Disentangling Effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity on children's acquisition of verb inflection: An elicited production study of Japanese. Cognitive Science, 42(S2), 555-577. [open access] [blog post]
Saviciute, E., Ambridge, B., & Pine, J.M. (2018). The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology. Journal of Child Language, 45(3), 641-672 [open access]
Ambridge, B., Goldwater, M.B., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2017). Analogical structure mapping and the formation of abstract constructions: A novel-construction-learning study. In K. Syrrett and S. Arunachalam (Eds.) Semantics in Language Acquisition, pp.178-196 [preprint]
Blything, R.P., Ambridge, B., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2017). Children's acquisition of the English past-Tense: Evidence for a single-route account from novel verb production data. Cognitive Science, 42(S2), 621-639. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12581. [OSF]
Ambridge, B. (2017). Horses for courses: When acceptability judgments are more suitable than structural priming (and vice versa). Commentary on Branigan and Pickering. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 40. e284 [pdf]
Ambridge, B. (2017). Syntactic categories in child language acquisition: innate, induced or illusory? In Cohen, H. & Lefebvre, C. (Eds). Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier. [docx]
Ambridge, B. & Blything, R.P. (2016). A connectionist model of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization. Journal of Child Language, 43(6), 1245-1276. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Pine, J.M., Rowland, C.F. & Freudenthal, D. (2016). Is passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from adult grammaticality judgment and comprehension studies. Cognitive Science, 40(6) 1435-1459 [open access]
Twomey, K., Chang, F., & Ambridge, B. (2016). Lexical distributional cues, but not situational cues, are readily used to learn abstract locative verb-structure associations. Cognition, 153, 124-139 [open access]
Rasanen, S. H. M., Ambridge, B. & Pine, J. M. (2016). An elicited-production study of inflectional verb morphology in child Finnish. Cognitive Science, 40(7), 1704- 1738 [pdf]
Aguado-Orea, J., Otero, N. & Ambridge, B. (2016). Statistics and Semantics in the acquisition of Spanish word order: Testing two accounts of the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors. Linguistics Vanguard, 2(1), 1-22[open acess]
Ambridge, B., Bannard, C., & Jackson, G.H. (2015). Is grammar spared in Autism Spectrum Disorder? Data from judgments of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 45(10), 3288-3296. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Twomey, E., Pine, J.M., Rowland, C.F. & Freudenthal, D. (2015). Preemption versus Entrenchment: Towards a construction-general solution to the problem of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization. PLoS ONE 10(4): e0123723. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0123723 [open access]
Ambridge, B., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2015). A Constructivist account of child language acquisition. In B. MacWhinney and W. O'Grady (Eds). Handbook of Language Emergence. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. (pp. 478-510) [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2015). Explanatory adequacy is not enough: Response to commentators. Language: Perspectives. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Rowland, C.F., Theakston, A.L. & Kidd, E.J. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 42(2), 239-73 [Target article + commentaries] [open access]
Ambridge, B. (2015). Island constraints and overgeneralization in language acquisition. Cognitive Linguistics, 26(2), 361-370. [pdf]
Blything, R.P. Ambridge, B., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2014). Children use statistics and semantics in the retreat from overgeneralization. PLoS ONE, 9(10) e110009. [open access]
Ambridge, B., Noble, C., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2014). The semantics of the transitive causative construction: Evidence from a forced-choice pointing study with adults and children. Cognitive Linguistics, 25(2), 293-311. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2014). Child Language Acquisition: Why Universal Grammar doesn't help. Language: Perspectives. [pdf] [commentaries (zip)] [Response (pdf)]
Twomey, K., Chang, F., & Ambridge, B. (2014). Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition. Cognitive Psychology, 73, 41-71 [pdf]
Bidgood, A., Ambridge, B., Pine, J.M. & Rowland, C.F. (2014). The retreat from locative overgeneralisation errors: A novel verb grammaticality judgment study. PLoS ONE, 9(5), e97634 [open access] [Excel data]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M, Rowland, C. F., Freudenthal, D., & Chang, F. (2014). Avoiding dative overgeneralization errors: semantics, statistics or both? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(2), 218-243. [pdf] [Appendices]
Rasanen, S. H. M., Ambridge, B. & Pine, J. M. (2014). Infinitives or bare stems? Are English-speaking children defaulting to the highest frequency form? Journal of Child Language, 41, 756-779[pdf]
Ambridge, B. (2013). How do children restrict their linguistic generalizations?: an (un-)grammaticality judgment study. Cognitive Science, 37 (3), 508-543. [Open Access]
Ambridge, B., & Rowland, C. F. (2013). Experimental methods in studying child language acquisition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4, 149-168. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J.M., Rowland, C.F., Chang, F. & Bidgood, A. (2013). The retreat from overgeneralization in child language acquisition: Word learning, morphology and verb argument structure. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4: 47-62. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. (2013). Just who didn't eat what, exactly? Negation and universal quantification in the real world. Linguistic Approaches to Billingualism, 3(3), 287-288 [pdf]
Ambridge, B. & Brandt, S. (2013). "Lisa filled water into the cup": The roles of entrenchment, pre-emption and verb semantics in German speakers’ L2 acquisition of English locatives. Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 61(3), 245-263 [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J.M. & Rowland, C.F. (2012). Semantics versus statistics in the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors. Cognition, 123(2) 260–279. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F. & Chang, F. (2012). The roles of verb semantics, entrenchment and morphophonology in the retreat from dative argument structure overgeneralization errors. Language, 88(1) 45–81. [pdf]
Rowland, C.F., Chang, F., Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2012). The development of abstract syntax: Evidence from structural priming and the lexical boost. Cognition, 125(1) 49–63. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. & Lieven, E.V.M., (2011) Child Language Acquisition: Contrasting theoretical approaches. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [book preview]
Ambridge, B. (2011) Paradigms for assessing children’s knowledge of syntax and morphology in E. Hoff (ed.) Guide to Research Methods in Child Language. London: Blackwell-Wiley (pp 113-132). [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J.M. & Rowland, C.F., (2011). Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors: A novel verb grammaticality judgment study. Cognitive Linguistics, 22(2), 303–323. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. (2010). Children’s judgments of regular and irregular novel past tense forms: New data on the dual- versus single-route debate. Developmental Psychology 46(6), 1497-1504. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F., Jones, R.L, & Clark, V. (2009). A semantics-based approach to the ‘no negative-evidence’ problem Cognitive Science, 33(7), 1301-1316. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., & Rowland, C.F. (2009). Predicting children’s errors with negative questions: Testing a schema-combination account. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(2), 225-266. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Pine, J.M., Rowland, C.F. & Young, C.R. (2008) The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children's and adults' graded judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors. Cognition. 106(1), 87-129. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., & Pine, J. M. (2008). Is Structure Dependence an innate constraint? New experimental evidence from children's complex question production. Cognitive Science, 32(1), 222-255. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., & Goldberg, A., E. (2008). The island status of clausal complements: evidence in favor of an information structure explanation. Cognitive Linguistics, 19(3), 349-381. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. & Pine. J.M. (2006) Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model using an Elicited Imitation Paradigm. Journal of Child Language 33(4)879-898. [pdf]
Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2006) Comparing Different Accounts of Non-Inversion Errors in Children’s Non-Subject Wh-Questions: ‘What experimental data can tell us?’ Journal of Child Language 30(3) 519-557. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. Theakston, A., Lieven, E.V.M. & Tomasello, M. (2006) The Distributed Learning Effect for Children’s Acquisition of an Abstract Grammatical Construction. Cognitive Development 21, 174–193. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. (2004). Experimental investigations of the formation and restriction of abstract grammatical constructions in young children. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Manchester. [doc]
Gathercole, S.E., Pickering, S.J, Ambridge, B. & Waring, H. (2004) The Structure of Working Memory from 4-15 Years of Age. Developmental Psychology 40(2) 177-190. [pdf]
Unpublished
Ambridge, B., Thomas, E., & Uden, B. (unpublished). Good, gooder, goodest (da, daach, daaf): The role of input frequency on overgeneralization errors with Welsh comparative adjectives. [docx]
Book Reviews
Ambridge, B. (2010) Review of Gulzow and N. Gagarina (Eds). Frequency Effects in Language Acquisition: Defining the limits of frequency as an explanatory concept. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Journal of Child Language, 37(2), 453-460. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. (2009) Review of Ninio, A. (2006) Language and the learning curve: A new theory of Syntactic Development: Oxford: Oxford University Press. Infant and Child Development, 18 102-104. [pdf]
Ambridge, B. (2009) Review of Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R.M (2005) Action meets word: How children learn verbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Infant and Child Development, 18 99-101. [pdf]
Handouts and things
Slides for my LOT summer school course on Child Language Acquisition, based partly on my textbook [zip]
A Psychology tutorial based on Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science; predictably called Bad Psychology
Learn the Russian alphabet with this chart
Statistics for the terrified in two pages (between subjects t-test with no SPSS[TM]) [pdf] [xlsx]
Worksheet with datafile: Running a complex within-subjects ANOVA in SPSS[TM] (and reporting it) [zip]
Got SPSS[TM] data that you need to convert into R format? Here's how [Handout by Amy Bidgood]
Got a load of CSV data files that you need to join together? [be my guest]
Ambridge, B. (2014). Over-generalization of grammatical constructions. In. P. Brooks, V. Kempe, & J.G. Golson (Eds.) Encyclopaedia of Language Development [docx]
Ambridge, B. (2014). Grammaticality Judgment Task. In. P. Brooks, V. Kempe, & J.G. Golson (Eds.) Encyclopaedia of Language Development [docx]
Ambridge, B. (in press). Language Development. In Miller, H.L. (Ed.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory in Psychology [docx]
Ambridge, B. (in press). Language Acquisition. In Hopkins, B., Geangu E., & S. Linkenauger (Eds) Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development [pdf]
Music