A bit about Ben Ambridge
My research investigates children's first language acquisition, mostly using judgement and production methodologies. I am particularly interested in children's overgeneralization errors (e.g., *The joked giggled him; *I falled over ) and errors involving question formation (e.g., *What he doesn't like? ). I also study children's acquisition of morphology, focusing particularly on agreement/case-marking errors in morphologically rich languages, such as Japanese, Polish, Finnish and Lithuanian.
I also have three sidelines:
- Conducting studies that investigate alternative discourse/processing-based accounts of so-called "Universal Grammar" phenomena (e.g., subjacency; structure dependence),
- Writing review articles/chapters (ideally controversial ones) and a textbook (Child Language Acquisition: Contrasting Theoretical Approaches) and
- Writing popular science, including my books, Psy-Q and Are You Smarter Than A Chimpanzee?, which introduce readers to interesting findings from the Psychology literature by means of interactive tests, games, illusions and quizzes.
Please see my website for more information.
My Role in LuCiD
I lead a project testing pragmatic accounts of complex linguistic constraints.
In Phase 1, I led two LuCiD Work Packages. One investigated children’s transition from lexically-specific to abstract syntactic knowledge, focussing specifically on their production of English wh- questions. The second investigated how children learn to use and comprehend nominative and accusative case marking (indicating “who did what to whom”) in two languages with relatively flexible word order: Polish and Finnish.
LuCiD publications (71) by Ben Ambridge
Ambridge, B., McCauley, S. M., Bannard, C., Davis, M., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Gummery, A., & Theakston, A. (2023). Uninversion error in English-speaking children’s wh-questions: Blame it on the bigrams? Language Development Research, 3 (1), pp. 121-155.
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.
Maitreyee, R., Saxena, G., Narasimhan, B., Misra Sharma, D., Mishra, P., Bhaya Nair, R., 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.
Ambridge, B. (2022). Why Algebraic systems aren't sufficient for syntax: Experimental evidence from passives in English, Mandarin, Indonesian, Balinese and Hebrew. In Lappin S, Bernardy J.P (Ed.), Algebraic Structures in Natural Language. (pp. 94-112).
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), 1-18. [31055]
Darmasetiyawan, I. M. S., & Ambridge, B. (2022). Syntactic Representations Contain Semantic Information: Evidence From Balinese Passives Collabra: Psychology, 8(1).
Ambridge B, Doherty L, Maitreyee R et al. (2022). Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’ [version 1; peer review: 3 approved with reservations]. Open Research Europe 2021, 1:1
Rowland, C., Theakston, A., Ambridge, B., & Twomey, K. E. (Eds.). (2020). Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How Children Use Their Environment To Learn. Trends in Language Acquisition Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 330 pp.
Ambridge, B. & Wagner, L. (2021). Testable theories of core first language acquisition Journal of Child Language, 48, 859–861.
McCauley, S.M., Bannard, C., Theakston, A., 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, 24: e13125.
Ambridge, B. (2021). A Computational Simulation of Children’s Language Acquisition 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2021).
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 K'iche’ Mayan to Predict Grammaticality Judgments in Balinese Cognitive Science, 45: e12974.
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.
Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., & Thomas, K. (2020). Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD: Elicited production of passive Journal of Child Language (2021), 48, 184–201.
Ambridge, B. (2021). Language Development Research Editorial: Why do we need another journal? Language Development Research
Ambridge, B., Maitreyee, R., Tatsumi, T., Doherty, L., Zicherman, S., Pedro, P. M., . . . Mendoza, M. J. (2020). The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche' Cognition, 202.
Bidgood, A., Pine, J., Rowland, C., Sala, G., Freudenthal, D. & Ambridge, B. (2021). Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: Grammaticality judgments and production priming. Language and Cognition Language and Cognition 13, 397–437.
Ambridge, B. (2020). Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition First Language, Vol. 40(5-6) 509–559
Ambridge, B. (2020). Abstractions made of exemplars or ‘You’re all right, and I’ve changed my mind’: Response to commentators First Language, Vol. 40(5-6) 640–659
Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., Theakston, A. L. & Twomey, K. E. (2020). Introduction. In Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn. John Benjamins pp. 1-7.
Ambridge, B. & Ambridge, C. (2020). The retreat from transitive-causative overgeneralization errors. Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn. John Benjamins pp. 113-130.
Bidgood, A., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F. & 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), e12892.
McCauley, S.M., Bannard, C., Theakston, A., Davis, M., Cameron-Faulkner, T., & Ambridge, B. (2019). Multiword units predict non-inversion errors in children’s wh-questions: “What corpus data can tell us? In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.) Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. & Gummery, A. (2019). Teaching the unlearnable: A training study of complex yes/no questions. Language and Cognition.
Ambridge, B. (2017). Are you smarter than a chimpanzee? Profile Books Ltd.
List, C., Ambridge, B., Lieven, E. v. M., & Pine, J. M. (2018). A comparison study on verb-marking errors from German and English children with Developmental Language Disorder and language-matched controls. Paper presented at the Conference on Developmental Language Disorders, Madrid, Spain.
Ambridge, B. (2015). Summer Babies. Interview with BBC 5Live
Ambridge, B. (2017). The retreat from overgeneralisation in child language acquisition. Language and Cognition Seminar, UCL, London, UK.
Engelmann, F., Kolak, J., Vihman, V., Granlund, S., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A., (2018). How the input shapes the acquisition of inflectional morphology: Modelling across three highly inflected languages. 43rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.
Engelmann, F., Kolak, J., Vihman, V., Granlund, S., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A., Lieven, E. (2018). How the input shapes the acquisition of inflectional morphology: Computational modelling across three highly inflected languages. In Proceedings of the 24th AMLaP conference, Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing, Berlin, Germany.
Engelmann, F., Kolak, J., Vihman, V., Granlund, S., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A., Lieven, E. (2018). How the input shapes the acquisition of verb and noun morphology: neural network modelling across three highly inflected languages. Paper presented at Learning Language in Humans and in Machines (L2HM) Workshop Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.
Ambridge, B. (2018). Language acquisition in children. Serious Science
Ambridge, B. (2018). Two theories of language acquisition. Serious Science
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.
Sassenhagen, J., Blything, R., Lieven, E., Ambridge, B. (2018). Frequency sensitivity of neural responses to English verb argument structure violations. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 38.
Aryawibawa, N., Ambridge, B. (2018). Is syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from a grammaticality judgement study of Indonesian. Cognitive Science, 42(8), 3135-3148.
Kołak, J., Granlund, S., Vihman, V., Engelmann, F., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2018). Acquisition of noun inflection in three languages: The role of input frequency and linguistic complexity. Poster presented at the Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, Budapest, Hungary.
List, C., Lieven, E., Ambridge, B. & Pine, J. M., (2017). Testing two different models of verb-marking error in children with Developmental Language Disorder and language-matched controls. (1) Poster presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL) workshop, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
List, C., Ambridge, B., Lieven, E. & Pine, J. M. (2017). Testing two different models of verb-marking error in children with Developmental Language Disorder and language-matched controls. Paper presented at the 3rd annual LuCiD conference, Lancaster, UK.
Ambridge, B., Noble, C., Lieven, E. (2014). The semantics of the transitive causative construction: Evidence from a forced-choice pointing study with adults and children. Cognitive Linguistics 25(2) p.293-311.
Ambridge, B., Bannard, C., Jackson, G. (2015). Is grammar spared in Autism Spectrum Disorder? Data from judgements of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 45(10), 3288-3296
Ambridge, B. & Blything, R. (2015). A connectionist model of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization. Journal of Child Language, 43(6), 1245-1276.
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 (Suppl 2), 621–639. doi:10.1111/cogs.12581
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.
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.
Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Vihman, V., Engelmann, F., Lieven, E., Pine, J., Theakston, A., & 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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.04.004
Engelmann, F., Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Szreder, M., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A., and Lieven, E. (2019). How the input shapes the acquisition of verb morphology: Elicited production and computational modelling in two highly inflected languages. Cognitive Pscyhology, 110, 30-69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.02.001
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.
Engelmann, F., Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). Cross-linguistic acquisition of complex verb inflection in a neural network model. (1) Paper presented at The 3rd LuCiD Language and Communicative Development Conference, Lancaster, UK.
Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Szreder, M., Engelmann, F., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). Predicting errors in children’s production of verb morphology: evidence from person/number marking in Finnish and Polish. (1) Paper presented at The 3rd LuCiD Language and Communicative Development Conference, Lancaster, UK.
Engelmann, F., Kolak, J., Granlund, S., Szreder, M., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). The acquisition of verb inflection in a connectionist model. Paper presented at the 14th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Lyon, France.
Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Szreder, M., Engelmann, F., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). Predicting errors in children’s production of verb morphology: evidence from person/number marking in Finnish and Polish. Paper presented at the 14th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Lyon, France.
Engelmann, F., Kolak, J., Granlund, S., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). The acquisition of complex verb morphology in Finnish and Polish: model and experiment. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, London, UK.
Engelmann, F., Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E (2017). Cross-linguistic acquisition of complex verb inflection in a connectionist model. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP), Lancaster, UK.
Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Vihman, V., Engelmann, F., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). Acquisition of noun case marking in morphologically complex languages. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP), Lancaster, UK.
Engelmann, F., Kolak, J., Granlund, S., Szreder, M., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). The acquisition of Polish and Finnish verb inflection in a connectionist model. Paper presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), Zurich, Switzerland.
Kolak, J., Granlund, S., Vihman, V., Engelmann, F., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). An experimental study on the acquisition of noun case marking in Estonian, Finnish and Polish. Paper presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), Zurich, Switzerland.
Engelmann, F., Granlund, S., Kolak, J., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). Cross-linguistic acquisition of complex verb inflection in a neural network model. Paper presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL) workshop, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Kolak, J., Granlund, S., Vihman, V., Engelmann, F., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2017). An experimental study on the acquisition of nominal case marking in Estonian, Finnish and Polish. Poster presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL) workshop, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Savičiūtė, E., Ambridge, B. & Pine, J. M. (2018). The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology: An elicitation study of familiar and novel Lithuanian nouns. Journal of Child Language, 45(3), 641-672.
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, 555-577
Engelmann, F., Szreder, M., Kolak, J., Granlund, S., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Theakston, A., & Lieven, E. (2016). Modelling the acquisition of Polish verb inflection. Paper presented at the the 2nd LuCiD Language and Communicative Development Conference, Manchester, UK.
Räsänen, S. H. M., Ambridge, B. & Pine, J. M. (2016). Comparing generativist and constructivist accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology: An elicited production study of Finnish. Cognitive Science, 40(7), 1704-1738
Blything, R., Ambridge, B., Lieven, E. (2015). Children Use Statistics and Semantics in the Retreat from Overgeneralization PLoS ONE, 9, 10
Ambridge, B. (2015). Island constraints and overgeneralization in language acquisition Cognitive Linguistics, 26(2), 361-370
Ambridge, B., Lieven, E., (2015). A Constructivist Account of Child Language Acquisition In The Handbook of Language Emergence, (eds B. MacWhinney and W. O'Grady), John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ, USA. pp478-510
Twomey, K. E., 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.
Ambridge, B. (2015). Clever mistakes. Talk given 8 November, Manchester Museum.
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., & Lieven, E. V. M. (2015). Explanatory adequacy is not enough: Response to commentators on 'Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help. Language: Perspectives, 91(3): E116-126
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): 1435-59.
Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Twomey, K. 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.