Ben Ambridge

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Liverpool

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 effect predicted by these theories has been observed only inconsistently in previous studies. Our study addresses t...

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...

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 the man; “*” indicates an ungrammatical form). The past 30 years have seen an unresolved debate between statist...

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 investigated this question for Hindi ergative ne marking; another semi-regular but exception-filled system. Gen...

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 onto the by-object or an understood argument) having acted upon it”. (Pinker, Lebeaux & Frost, 1987). In the p...

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 investigated this question for Hindi ergative ne marking; another semi-regular but exception-filled system. Gen...

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 construction: Balinese passives. Using a grammatical acceptability judgment methodology with 60 native adult spe...

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 appropriate? This question has long been seen as one that is both particularly central to acquisition researc...

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 information” (Branigan & Pickering, 2017: 8). As a test case, we focussed on the English passive; a construction for whi...

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's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word se...

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 transiti...

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 (e.g., Somebody broke the window vs. Somebody MADE the window break; *Somebody cried the boy vs. Somebody MADE t...

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 appropriate? This question has long been seen as one that is both particularly central to acquisition researc...

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 sca...

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, focussing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained, varyi...

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 “r...

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...

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,...

Subject-auxiliary inversion in interrogatives has been a topic of great interest in language acquisition research, and has often been held up as evidence for the structure-dependence of grammar. Usage-based and nativist approaches posit different representations and processes underlying children's question formation and therefore predict different...

The aim of this large-scale, preregistered, cross-linguistic study was to mediate between theories of the acquisition of inflectional morphology, which lie along a continuum from rule-based to analogy-based. Across three morphologically rich languages (Polish, Finnish and Estonian), 120 children (mean age 48.32 months, SD = 7.0 months) completed an...

The aim of the present work was to develop a computational model of how children acquire inflectional morphology for marking person and number; one of the central challenges in language development. First, in order to establish which putative learning phenomena are sufficiently robust to constitute a target for modelling, we ran large-scale elicite...

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 preregistered, randomized, 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 c...

How are verb-argument structure preferences acquired? Children typically receive very little negative evidence, raising the question of how they come to understand the restrictions on grammatical constructions. Statistical learning theories propose stochastic patterns in the input contain sufficient clues. For example, if a verb is very common, but...

A central debate in the cognitive sciences surrounds the nature of adult speakers' linguistic representations: Are they purely syntactic (a traditional and widely held view; e.g., Branigan & Pickering, 2017a), or are they semantically structured? A recent study (Ambridge, Bidgood, Pine, Rowland, & Freudenthal, 2016) found support for the latter vie...

We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g. *You giggled me). Experiment 1investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitiv...

(Note that a published version of this paper is available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343425612_Syntactic_Representations_Are_Both_Abstract_and_Semantically_Constrained_Evidence_From_Children's_and_Adults'_Comprehension_and_ProductionPriming_of_the_English_Passive) A key question in language research is whether linguistic represe...

This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semant...

The goal of this paper 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 in hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings, (2...

How do speakers avoid producing verb overgeneralization errors such as *She covered paint onto the wall or *She poured the cup with water? Five previous papers have found seemingly contradictory results concerning the role of statistical preemption (competition from acceptable alternatives such as She covered the wall with paint or She poured water...

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...

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model (e.g., Pra...

Traditionally, it has generally been assumed that adult speakers are in possession of syntactic categories such as NOUN (e.g., boy, girl) and VERB (e.g., see, dance). This chapter evaluates three possibilities for how children acquire these categories. The first is that syntactic categories are innate (i.e., present from—or even before—birth) and t...

Although structural priming is often the most suitable paradigm, it sometimes misses effects that are detected by more sensitive acceptability-judgment tasks, thus yielding incorrect conclusions. For example, Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) claim that “syntactic representations do not contain semantic information” (sect. 2.1, para. 2), while support...

This Poster was presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL) workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in October 2017.

This study aims to disentangle the often-confounded effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of inflection, by focusing on simple and complex verb forms in Japanese. Study 1 tested 28 children aged 3;3-4;3 on stative (complex) and simple past forms, and Study 2 tested 30 children aged 3;5-5;3 on completive (co...

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 targ...

Although structural priming is often the most suitable paradigm in linguistic research [as argued in Branigan and Pickering's BBS target article], it sometimes misses effects that are detected by more sensitive acceptability-judgment tasks, hence yielding incorrect conclusions. For example, Branigan & Pickering’s claim that “syntactic representatio...

Many generativist accounts (e.g., Wexler, 1998) argue for very early knowledge of inflection on the basis of very low rates of person/number marking errors in young children’s speech. However, studies of Spanish (Aguado-Orea, 2004) and Brazilian Portuguese (Rubino & Pine, 1998) have revealed that these low overall error rates actually hide importan...

In order to explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., *£5 was cost by the book), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible wi...

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/nup...

Data S1. Extended set of 475 verbs. Data S2. Animations.

Children must learn the structural biases of locative verbs in order to avoid making overgeneralisation errors (e.g., ∗I filled water into the glass). It is thought that they use linguistic and situational information to learn verb classes that encode structural biases. In addition to situational cues, we examined whether children and adults could...

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...

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 acq...

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 11-13 (N = 16) and an IQ-matched typically developing (TD) group aged 7-12 (N = 16) completed a graded grammaticality judgment task, as well as a standardized test of cognitive function. In a departure from previous studies, the judgment task involved verb argument structure overgeneralization error...

Participants aged 5;2-6;8, 9;2-10;6 and 18;1-22;2 (72 at each age) rated verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Daddy giggled the baby) using a five-point scale. The study was designed to investigate the feasibility of two proposed construction-general solutions to the question of how children retreat from, or avoid, such errors....

ABSTRACT 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...

Authors' response - Volume 42 Issue 2 - BEN AMBRIDGE, EVAN KIDD, CAROLINE F. ROWLAND, ANNA THEAKSTON

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 backgr...

This chapter outlines a constructivist account of the process of language acquisition. It summarizes the constructivist account of development, and the current state of the empirical evidence, for each of four particularly well-studied domains: the acquisition of (1) determiners, (2) inflectional morphology (3) basic word order, and (4) more advanc...

How do children learn to restrict their productivity and avoid ungrammatical utterances? The present study addresses this question by examining why some verbs are used with un- prefixation (e.g., unwrap) and others are not (e.g., *unsqueeze). Experiment 1 used a priming methodology to examine children's (3-4; 5-6) grammatical restrictions on verbal...

How do children eventually come to avoid the production of overgeneralisation errors, in particular, those involving the dative (e.g., *I said her ''no'')? The present study addressed this question by obtaining from adults and children (5-6, 9-10 years) judgements of well-formed and over-general datives with 301 different verbs (44 for children). A...

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-producti...

Children overgeneralise verbs to ungrammatical structures early in acquisition, but retreat from these overgeneralisations as they learn semantic verb classes. In a large corpus of English locative utterances (e.g., the woman sprayed water onto the wall/wall with water), we found structural biases which changed over development and which could expl...

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 W...

Whilst some locative verbs alternate between the ground- and figure-locative constructions (e.g. Lisa sprayed the flowers with water/Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers), others are restricted to one construction or the other (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/*Lisa poured the cup with water). The present study investigated two proposals for how...

Productive language use depends on children first observing, and then generalising, grammatical patterns. For example, children hear pairs of sentences such as (a) and assume that other verbs heard in intransitive sentences can also alternate between the two structures. While this enables creative language use (b), it can also lead to overgeneralis...

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 (a) identifying syntactic categories such as NOUN and VERB (distributional analysis,...

Early in acquisition children overgeneralize verbs to ungrammatical structures. The retreat from overgeneralization is linked to the acquisition of verb classes, the semantics of which constrain the structures in which a verb can appear (e.g., Pinker 1989; Ambridge, Pine & Rowland, 2012). How children learn these classes remains unclear. Some argue...

A central challenge for learners of English is discovering verbs’ argument structure privileges; for example which verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground locative construction (e.g. Lisa poured water into the cup/ *Lisa poured the cup with water), which show the opposite pattern (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/ Lisa filled...

At the heart of language acquisition lies a paradox: while children must form generalizations allowing them to use lexical items in non-attested constructions – such productivity is a defining characteristic of human language – they must learn to avoid applying these generalizations when an ungrammatical utterance would result. One generalization t...

This article reviews the some of the most widely used methods used for studying children's language acquisition including (1) spontaneous/naturalistic, diary, parental report data, (2) production methods (elicited production, repetition/elicited imitation, syntactic priming/weird word order), (3) comprehension methods (act-out, pointing, intermodal...

Unlabelled: This review investigates empirical evidence for different theoretical proposals regarding the retreat from overgeneralization errors in three domains: word learning (e.g., *doggie to refer to all animals), morphology [e.g., *spyer, *cooker (one who spies/cooks), *unhate, *unsqueeze, *sitted; *drawed], and verb argument structure [e.g.,...

A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like compe-tence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action, un-can be adde...

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 taki...

Production and Comprehension ParadigmsResearch AimProcedureDataConclusion ReferencesFurther Reading and Resources

Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of wellformed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositionalobject 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...

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., Lisa poured water into the cup; *Lisa poured the cup with water), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., *Bart filled water into the cup; Bart filled the cup with water), and others appearing in...

This chapter briefly summarizes some of the most widely used experimental paradigms in the domain of grammatical development (elicited production, repetition, weird word order, priming, act-out, and preferential looking and pointing tasks) before focusing in more detail on a relatively new grammaticality judgment paradigm. This new paradigm allows...

Whilst certain verbs may appear in both the intransitive inchoative and the transitive causative constructions (    The ball rolled/The man rolled the ball), others may appear in only the former (    The man laughed/*The joke laughed the man). Some accounts argue that children acquire these restrictions using only (or mainly) statistical learning m...

Is children‘s language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction t...

Is language governed by formal rules or by analogy to stored exemplars? The acquisition of the English past tense has long played a central role in this debate. In the present study, children rated the acceptability of a regular and an irregular past-tense form of each of 40 novel verbs (e.g., fleeped, flept) using a 5-point scale. The novel verbs...

Previous studies have shown that children retreat from argument-structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Don't giggle me) by inferring that frequently encountered verbs are unlikely to be grammatical in unattested constructions, and by making use of syntax-semantics correspondences (e.g., verbs denoting internally caused actions such as giggling...

A simple three-layer feed-forward network was trained to classify verbs as reversible with un-(e.g., unpack) reversible with dis-(e.g., disassemble) or non-reversible (e.g., squeeze), on the basis of their semantic features. The aim was to model a well-known phenomenon whereby children produce, then subsequently retreat from, overgeneralization err...

Positive and negative what, why and yes/no questions with the 3sg auxilia-ries can and does were elicited from 50 children aged 3;3–4;3. In support of the constructivist ''schema-combination'' account, only children who pro-duced a particular positive question type correctly (e.g., What does she want?) produced a characteristic ''auxiliary-doubling...

The present paper provides evidence that suggests that speakers determine which constructions can be combined, at least in part, on the basis of the compatibility of the information structure properties of the constructions in-volved. The relative ''island'' status of the following sentence complement constructions are investigated: ''bridge'' verb...

Participants (aged 5-6 yrs, 9-10 yrs and adults) rated (using a five-point scale) grammatical (intransitive) and overgeneralized (transitive causative)(1) uses of a high frequency, low frequency and novel intransitive verb from each of three semantic classes [Pinker, S. (1989a). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cam...

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as Is the boy who smoking is crazy? because they have innate knowledge of structure dependence and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid such errors, on the basi...

The present study used an elicited imitation paradigm to test the prediction of Schutze & Wexler's (1996) AGREEMENT/TENSE OMISSION MODEL (ATOM) that the rate of non-nominative subjects with agreement-marked verb forms will be sufficiently low that such errors can reasonably be disregarded as noise in the data. A screening procedure identified five...

This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words (what, who, how and why), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6-4;6. Rates of noninversion error (Who she is hitting?) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxi...

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this distributed learning effect with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children aged 3...

The structure of working memory and its development across the childhood years were investigated in children 4-15 years of age. The children were given multiple assessments of each component of the A. D. Baddeley and G. Hitch (1974) working memory model. Broadly similar linear functions characterized performance on all measures as a function of age...