Ben Ambridge

Datos Biográficos

ID568790
NOMBREBen Ambridge
NOMBRESBen
APELLIDOAmbridge
FIRMABEN AMBRIDGE
AFILIACIONESUniversity of Liverpool
ORCID0000-0003-2389-8477
VERIFICADOSí
TOTAL DE OBRAS34
TOTAL DE CITAS119
TOTAL COMO AUTOR34
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN2004
AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN2025
ÍNDICE H4

  • Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation

    Open AccessLiam Blything, A L Theakston et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2025

    Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. himself ) are driven by real-world likelihood. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by topicality. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by discourse-pragmatics. • Innate binding principles may be unnecessary to explain pronoun interpretation. How do English-speakers interpret pronouns (e.g., himself, him and he ) in sentences such as Samuel told Oliver abo…

  • Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Liam P Blything et al.ARTICLETheoretical Linguistics2024

    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 both The man laughed and * Someone laughed the man . Verbal accounts of this phenomenon either do not make precise quantitative predictions at all, or do so only with the help of ancillary assumptions and by-han…

  • Evidence from Balinese

    Open AccessI Nyoman Aryawibawa, Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg et al.ARTICLEJurnal Kajian Bali (Journal of…2023

    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 is most probable. In Study 1, 44 Balinese speakers each rated the relative acceptability of the Subject- and Object-control readings of 272 Balinese sentences of this type. In Study 2, 20 Balinese speakers rated …

  • Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions

    Open AccessAmy Bidgood, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage and Cognition2021

    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 entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 2 used syntactic priming to elicit overgeneralisation e…

  • Testable theories of core first language acquisition

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Laura WagnerARTICLEJournal of Child Language2021

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  • Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Amy Bidgood et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2021

    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 groups showed similar levels of correct production, the ASD group produced a significantly greater number of “reversal” errors (e.g., “Wendy was hit by Bob”, when, in fact Wendy hit Bob) than the TD group (who, …

  • Balancing information-structure and semantic constraints on construction choice

    Open AccessLi Liu, Ben AmbridgeARTICLECognitive Linguistics2021Citada por: 3Referencias: 6

    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.g., John was rescued by Lizzy ) and “fronting” constructions (e.g., John was the one Lizzy rescued) . But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as d…

  • Teaching the unlearnable

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Caroline F Rowland et al.ARTICLELanguage and Cognition2020

    A central question in language acquisition is how children master sentence types that they have seldom, if ever, heard. Here we report the findings of a pre-registered, randomised, single-blind intervention study designed to test the prediction that, for one such sentence type, complex questions (e.g., Is the crocodile who’s hot eating? ), children could combine schemas learned, on the basis of the input, for complex noun phrases ( the [THING] wh…

  • The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Ramya Maitreyee et al.ARTICLECognition2020

    This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man, across three age groups (5-6 years, 9-10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the m…

  • Abstractions made of exemplars or ‘You’re all right, and I’ve changed my mind’

    Open AccessBen AmbridgeARTICLEFirst Language2020

    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 under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b) in the service of language use, re-represent these exemplars at multiple levels of abstraction, as si…

  • Against stored abstractions

    Open AccessBen AmbridgeARTICLEFirst Language2020

    The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings, (2) morphologically inflected words, (3) n-grams, (4) sentence-level constructions and (5) phonetics…

  • Testing an input-based account of children's errors with inflectional morphology

    Open AccessTomoko Tatsumi, Ben Ambridge et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system, which shows substantial by-verb variation in the frequency distribution of past and nonpast forms. 22 chi…

  • The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology

    Open AccessEgle Saviciute, Ben Ambridge et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    Four- and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the target form, and with the phonological neighbourhood density of the noun. Second, the error patterns wer…

  • Statistics and semantics in the acquisition of Spanish word order

    Open AccessJavier Aguado‐Orea, JAVIER AGUADO-OREA et al.ARTICLELinguistics Vanguard2016

    Native speakers of Spanish (children aged 6–7, 10–11 and adults) rated grammatical and ungrammatical ground- and figure-locative sentences with high frequency, low frequency and novel verbs (e. g., Lisa llenó/forró/nupó la caja con papel; *Lisa llenó/forró/nupó papel en la caja , ‘ Lisa filled/lined/nupped the box with paper’; ‘Lisa filled/lined/nupped paper into the box ’) using a 5-point scale. Echoing the findings of a previous English study (…

  • A connectionist model of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Ryan Blything et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2016

    A central question in language acquisition is how children build linguistic representations that allow them to generalize verbs from one construction to another (e.g., The boy gave a present to the girl → The boy gave the girl a present ), whilst appropriately constraining those generalizations to avoid non-adultlike errors (e.g., I said no to her → *I said her no ). Although a consensus is emerging that learners solve this problem using both sta…

  • The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Evan Kidd et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2015

    This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses…

  • Authors' response

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Evan Kidd et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2015

    Peer-reviewed

  • Island constraints and overgeneralization in language acquisition

    Open AccessBen AmbridgeARTICLECognitive Linguistics2015Citada por: 1Referencias: 8

    Ambridge and Goldberg (2008) found that long distance dependency (LDD) questions (e.g., Who did she mumble that she saw? ) do not seem to be formed by analogy with similar, more frequent sentences of the same type (e.g., What do you think X?; What did he say X? ), but, rather, that such questions are acceptable to the extent that the main verb backgrounds the complement clause (e.g., say > mumble ). Kalyan (2012) argued that this finding is compa…

  • Explanatory adequacy is not enough

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage2015Citada por: 1

    In this response to commentators on our target article ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn’t help’, we argue that the fatal flaw in most UG-based approaches to acquisition is their focus on describing the adult end-state in terms of a particular linguistic formalism. As a consequence, such accounts typically neglect to link acquisition to the language that the learner actually hears, instead assuming that she is able, by mean…

  • Infinitives or bare stems? Are English-speaking children defaulting to the highest-frequency form

    Open AccessSANNA HEINI MARIA RÄSÄNEN, Ben Ambridge et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2014

    Young English-speaking children often produce utterances with missing 3sg - s (e.g., * He play ). Since the mid 1990s, such errors have tended to be treated as Optional Infinitive (OI) errors, in which the verb is a non-finite form (e.g., Wexler, 1998; Legate & Yang, 2007). The present article reports the results of a cross-sectional elicited-production study with 22 children (aged 3;1–4;1), which investigated the possibility that at least some a…

  • The semantics of the transitive causative construction

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Claire Noble et al.ARTICLECognitive Linguistics2014Referencias: 2

    Adults and children aged 3;0–3;6 were presented with ungrammatical NVN uses of intransitive-only verbs (e.g., * Bob laughed Wendy ) and asked – by means of a forced-choice pointing task – to select either a causal construction-meaning interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob made Wendy laugh’) or a non-causal sentence-repair interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob laughed at Wendy’). Both age groups chose casual construction-meaning interpretations on at least 82% of trial…

  • Child language acquisition

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage2014Citada por: 4

    In many different domains of language acquisition, there exists an apparent learnability problem to which innate knowledge of some aspect of universal grammar (UG) has been proposed as a solution. The present article reviews these proposals in the core domains of (i) identifying syntactic categories, (ii) acquiring basic morphosyntax, (iii) structure dependence, (iv) subjacency, and (v) the binding principles. We conclude that, in each of these d…

  • Just who didn’t eat what, exactly

    Ben AmbridgeARTICLELinguistic Approaches to…2013

  • The development of abstract syntax

    Open AccessCaroline F Rowland, Franklin Chang et al.ARTICLECognition2012

    Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by taking a developmental approach to structural priming. Using a dialog comprehension-to-production paradi…

  • The roles of verb semantics, entrenchment, and morphophonology in the retreat from dative argument-structure overgeneralization errors

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Caroline F Rowland et al.ARTICLELanguage2012Citada por: 6Referencias: 1

    Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. Marge pulled the box to Homer /* Marge pulled Homer the box ). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a negative correlation was observed between verb frequency and the acceptability of errors, across all ag…