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A balanced Digital Diet for under 5s: a commentary on Orben (2021) (2022)
Journal Article
Bidgood, A., Taylor, G., Kolak, J., Bent, E., & Hickman, N. (2022). A balanced Digital Diet for under 5s: a commentary on Orben (2021). Infant and child development, https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2292

Orben (2021) proposed a ‘Digital Diet’ approach to thinking about children's consumption of digital media. Here, we consider the Digital Diet with a focus on young children under 5. As well as discussing how Type and Amount apply to this age group, w... Read More about A balanced Digital Diet for under 5s: a commentary on Orben (2021).

The junior doctor shadow board, lessons learned from the corporate sector (2021)
Journal Article
Home, J., Bidgood, A., & Kalipershad, S. (2021). The junior doctor shadow board, lessons learned from the corporate sector. BMJ Leader, 5(Sup. 1), A25. https://doi.org/10.1136/leader-2021-FMLM.67

Background: North Manchester General Hospital (NMGH) has a history of poor feedback from junior doctors, in both overall experience and access to non-clinical development opportunities. The advent of Covid-19 led the medical leadership team to seek a... Read More about The junior doctor shadow board, lessons learned from the corporate sector.

Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions : grammaticality judgments and production priming (2021)
Journal Article
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, 13(3), 397-437. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2021.8

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)... Read More about Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions : grammaticality judgments and production priming.

Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K'iche'. (2021)
Journal Article
Ambridge, B., Doherty, L., Maitreyee, R., Tatsumi, T., Zicherman, S., Mateo Pedro, P., …Fukumura, K. (2021). Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K'iche'. Open Research Europe, 1(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13008.2

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 appropriat... Read More about Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K'iche'..

Individual differences in first language acquisition and their theoretical implications (2020)
Book Chapter
Kidd, E., Bidgood, A., Donnelly, S., Durrant, S., Peter, M., & Rowland, C. (2020). Individual differences in first language acquisition and their theoretical implications. In C. Rowland, A. Theakston, B. Ambridge, & K. Twomey (Eds.), Current perspectives on child language acquisition : how children use their environment to learn (189-219). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.09kid

Much of Lieven’s pioneering work has helped move the study of individual differences to the centre of child language research. The goal of the present chapter is to illustrate how the study of individual differences provides crucial insights into the... Read More about Individual differences in first language acquisition and their theoretical implications.

Syntactic representations are both abstract and semantically constrained : evidence from children’s and adults’ comprehension and production/priming of the English passive (2020)
Journal Article
Bidgood, A., Pine, J., Rowland, C., & 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. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12892

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, focusing on the... Read More about Syntactic representations are both abstract and semantically constrained : evidence from children’s and adults’ comprehension and production/priming of the English passive.

Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development? (2020)
Journal Article
Durrant, S., Jessop, A., Chang, F., Bidgood, A., Peter, M., Pine, J., & Rowland, C. (2021). Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development?. Language and Cognition, 13(1), 66-98. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2020.26

By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, produci... Read More about Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development?.

Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD : elicited production of passives (2020)
Journal Article
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

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 show... Read More about Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD : elicited production of passives.

Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development (2020)
Journal Article
Frost, R., Jessop, A., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Bidgood, A., Pine, J., …Monaghan, P. (2020). Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development. Cognitive Psychology, 120, 101291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101291

To acquire language, infants must learn how to identify words and linguistic structure in speech. Statistical learning has been suggested to assist both of these tasks. However, infants’ capacity to use statistics to discover words and structure toge... Read More about Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development.

Does speed of processing or vocabulary size predict later language growth in toddlers? (2019)
Journal Article
Peter, M., Durrant, S., Jessop, A., Bidgood, A., Pine, J., & Rowland, C. (2019). Does speed of processing or vocabulary size predict later language growth in toddlers?. Cognitive Psychology, 115, 101238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.101238

It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on how their processing system is developing. In particular, recent studies suggest that individual differences in language processing s... Read More about Does speed of processing or vocabulary size predict later language growth in toddlers?.

Is passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from adult grammaticality judgment and comprehension studies (2015)
Journal Article
Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Pine, J., Rowland, C., & Freudenthal, D. (2016). Is passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from adult grammaticality judgment and comprehension studies. Cognitive Science, 40(6), 1435-1459. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12277

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 whe... Read More about Is passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from adult grammaticality judgment and comprehension studies.

Preemption versus entrenchment : towards a construction-general solution to the problem of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization (2015)
Journal Article
Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Twomey, K., Pine, J., Rowland, C., & 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), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0123723

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... Read More about Preemption versus entrenchment : towards a construction-general solution to the problem of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization.

The retreat from locative overgeneralisation errors : a novel verb grammaticality judgment study (2014)
Journal Article
Bidgood, A., Ambridge, B., Pine, J., & Rowland, C. (2014). The retreat from locative overgeneralisation errors : a novel verb grammaticality judgment study. PLoS ONE, 9(5), e97634. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0097634

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... Read More about The retreat from locative overgeneralisation errors : a novel verb grammaticality judgment study.

Late talking toddlers : relating early phonological development to later language advance (2012)
Journal Article
Vihman, M., Keren-Portnoy, T., Whitaker, C., Bidgood, A., & McGillion, M. (2012). Late talking toddlers : relating early phonological development to later language advance

Background. Expressive Late talkers are identified as children with an unusually small productive vocabulary for their age, in the absence of any other known neurological, sensory or cognitive deficit. Their lexical delay has been found to be associa... Read More about Late talking toddlers : relating early phonological development to later language advance.

The retreat from overgeneralization in child language acquisition : word learning, morphology, and verb argument structure (2012)
Journal Article
Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Rowland, C., Chang, F., & Bidgood, A. (2012). The retreat from overgeneralization in child language acquisition : word learning, morphology, and verb argument structure. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4(1), 47-62. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1207

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 s... Read More about The retreat from overgeneralization in child language acquisition : word learning, morphology, and verb argument structure.