Ben Ambridge
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View article: He has juice all over him(self): The role of functional-pragmatic constraints on 6- to 7-year-olds’ and adults’ use of reflexive and non-reflexive object pronouns.
He has juice all over him(self): The role of functional-pragmatic constraints on 6- to 7-year-olds’ and adults’ use of reflexive and non-reflexive object pronouns. Open
Consider the sentence Oliver said that Samuel washed [him vs himself]. How do English speaking adults and children know that him means Oliver; whereas himself means Samuel? Traditionally the answer has been determined by (possibly innate) …
View article: 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.
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. Open
Language acquisition is one of the crowning achievements of our species; though a long-standing and unresolved question is why many learners struggle with a particular core and fundamental sentence type. In English, a two-participant sente…
View article: Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation: Evidence from nine pre-registered rating studies
Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation: Evidence from nine pre-registered rating studies Open
How do English-speakers interpret pronouns (e.g., himself, him and he) in sentences such as Samuel told Oliver about himself, Samuel told Oliver about the picture of him, and He was driving home, when Yusuf started coughing? Since the 1980…
View article: Semantics and Statistics in the Formation of Causatives in Hijazi Arabic: Data From Semantic Ratings, Grammatical Acceptability Judgments and Computational Modeling
Semantics and Statistics in the Formation of Causatives in Hijazi Arabic: Data From Semantic Ratings, Grammatical Acceptability Judgments and Computational Modeling Open
The aim of the present study was to investigate the possibility that Hijazi Arabic – like other languages previously studied – uses morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more- versus less-direct causation, preferring to mark t…
View article: No surprises: Strong evidence against a prime-surprisal effect from a large pre-registered study with 42 different operationalizations of prime-surprisal.
No surprises: Strong evidence against a prime-surprisal effect from a large pre-registered study with 42 different operationalizations of prime-surprisal. Open
Prime-surprisal - an increased likelihood of structural repetition following surprising input - has emerged as a key paradigm for testing the claims of error-based learning theories of language acquisition. However, the prime-surprisal eff…
View article: Learners restrict their linguistic generalizations using preemption but not entrenchment: Evidence from artificial-language-learning studies with adults and children.
Learners restrict their linguistic generalizations using preemption but not entrenchment: Evidence from artificial-language-learning studies with adults and children. Open
A central goal of research into language acquisition is explaining how, when learners generalize to new cases, they appropriately restrict their generalizations (e.g., to avoid producing ungrammatical utterances such as *the clown laughed …
View article: Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics
Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics Open
Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics, at least in the domain of verb argument structure; explaining why (for example), we can say both The ball rolled and Someone rolled the ball , but not …
View article: 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
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
Background: A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields cats, dogs, etc, with exceptions feet and men). We in…
View article: 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
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 Open
Several recent experimental studies have investigated the hypothesis that the passive construction is associated with the semantics “[B] (mapped onto the surface [passive] subject) is in a state or circumstance characterized by [A] (mapped…
View article: Evidence from Balinese: Subject-Versus Object-Control Varies According to the Identity of the Verb, but not Necessarily the Probability of the Event Described
Evidence from Balinese: Subject-Versus Object-Control Varies According to the Identity of the Verb, but not Necessarily the Probability of the Event Described Open
The objective of the present study was to investigate whether interpretation (Subject-vs-Object control) of an understudied type of control sentence (Sarahi wants someonej [PROi/j] to entertain) depends at least in part on which scenario i…
View article: 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
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
Background: A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields cats, dogs , etc, with exceptions feet and men ). We…
View article: Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’
Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’ Open
How do language learners avoid the production of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (*The clown laughed the man c.f. The clown made the man laugh), while retaining the ability to apply such generalizations productively when …
View article: Is Passive Priming Really Impervious to Verb Semantics? A High-Powered Replication of Messenger Et al. (2012)
Is Passive Priming Really Impervious to Verb Semantics? A High-Powered Replication of Messenger Et al. (2012) Open
The aim of the present study was to conduct a particularly stringent pre-registered in-vestigation of the claim that there exists a level of linguistic representation that “includes syntactic category information but not semantic informati…
View article: Syntactic Representations Contain Semantic Information: Evidence From Balinese Passives
Syntactic Representations Contain Semantic Information: Evidence From Balinese Passives Open
Semantics-based approaches to syntax hold that the basic units of language are constructions: form-meaning pairings that have meanings in and of themselves. The aim of the present study was to test this claim using a previously-unstudied c…
View article: Multiword units lead to errors of commission in children's spontaneous production: “What corpus data can tell us?*”
Multiword units lead to errors of commission in children's spontaneous production: “What corpus data can tell us?*” Open
Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently‐encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children…
View article: Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: grammaticality judgments and production priming
Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: grammaticality judgments and production priming Open
We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., * You giggled me ). Experiment 1 investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and …
View article: Balancing information-structure and semantic constraints on construction choice: building a computational model of passive and passive-like constructions in Mandarin Chinese
Balancing information-structure and semantic constraints on construction choice: building a computational model of passive and passive-like constructions in Mandarin Chinese Open
A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active (e.g., Lizzy rescued John ), the passive (e…
View article: 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
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 Open
The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employ morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more‐ versus less‐direct causation, preferring to mark them with less‐ and more‐ overt marking, respectively (…
View article: Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’
Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’ Open
How do language learners avoid the production of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (*The clown laughed the man c.f. The clown made the man laugh), while retaining the ability to apply such generalizations productively when …
View article: Language Development Research Editorial: Why do we need another journal?
Language Development Research Editorial: Why do we need another journal? Open
Language Development Research is a platinum Open Access journal that commits to publishing “any empirical or theoretical paper that is relevant to the field of language development and that meets our criteria for rigour, without regard to …
View article: A Computational Simulation of Children’s Language Acquisition (Crazy New Idea)
A Computational Simulation of Children’s Language Acquisition (Crazy New Idea) Open
Many modern NLP models are already close to simulating children’s language acquisition; the main thing they currently lack is a "real world" representation of semantics that allows them to map from form to meaning and vice-versa. The aim o…
View article: SIGMORPHON 2021 Shared Task on Morphological Reinflection: Generalization Across Languages
SIGMORPHON 2021 Shared Task on Morphological Reinflection: Generalization Across Languages Open
This year's iteration of the SIGMORPHON Shared Task on morphological reinflection focuses on typological diversity and cross-lingual variation of morphosyntactic features. In terms of the task, we enrich UniMorph with new data for 32 langu…
View article: Abstractions made of exemplars or ‘You’re all right, and I’ve changed my mind’: Response to commentators
Abstractions made of exemplars or ‘You’re all right, and I’ve changed my mind’: Response to commentators Open
In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account unde…
View article: Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive
Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive Open
All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children’s knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focus…
View article: 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.
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. Open
The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employmorphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more- versus less-direct causation,preferring to mark them with less- and more- overt marking respectively (e.g…
View article: Passive sentence reversal errors in autism: Replicating Ambridge, Bidgood, and Thomas (2020)
Passive sentence reversal errors in autism: Replicating Ambridge, Bidgood, and Thomas (2020) Open
Ambridge, Bidgood, and Thomas (2020) conducted an elicitation-production task in which children with and without (high-functioning) autism described animations following priming with passive sentences. The authors report that children with…
View article: Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD: Elicited production of passives
Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD: Elicited production of passives Open
Children with ASD and an IQ-matched control group of typically developing (TD) children completed an elicited-production task which encouraged the production of reversible passive sentences (e.g., “Bob was hit by Wendy”). Although the two …
View article: LCO volume 12 issue 2 Cover and Back matter
LCO volume 12 issue 2 Cover and Back matter Open
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