Ben Ambridge

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work.

“If you do a power calculation it’s probably going to tell you that - for this between-subjects design- you’re gonna need like a minimum of 150 participants PER GROUP”

The Stories of Your Life: How Storytelling Explains Who We Are. Ben Ambridge

My latest book, about how we interpret real-life events using plots from movies, TV and novels, is now out in paperback: amzn.eu/d/0jiK7RoY. To celebrate, I talked about the book with my favourite writer Joel Golby on his podcast, Joel Golby's Book Club - shows.acast.com/joel-golbys-...

Good of Frontiers to send me a reminder to post my annual plea to my child language colleagues: DON’T SUBMIT TO OR REVIEW FOR FRONTIERS OR MDPI JOURNALS!

ManyLanguages is on two social platforms:

✨ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1107...

✨ Bluesky (this page): bsky.app/profile/many...

Follow us to stay in the loop, join discussions, and help us spread the word about Big Team Science.

Gen Z churchgoing is actually still declining, new British Social Attitudes Survey shows New analysis of recently published British Social Attitudes Survey data by Humanists UK has shown that churchgoing, including among Gen Z, has continued its long-term decline. The findings are consist...

‘It is clearer than ever that recent claims [by the Bible Society] of a wide scale Christian revival, whether misinformation or disinformation, need to be retracted... everyone has the obligation to be rigorous in their presentation of data in the public realm and the claims they make for it.’

When setting up @langdevres.bsky.social I wrote into the rules that while special issues are welcome, all papers must be reviewed by a regular Action Editor - some people have been puzzled by that, but this is why it’s vital!

The next one (though it's adults only) is a team-science project with @manylanguagesc.bsky.social looking at passives. We're keen to get as many diverse languages as possible so please get in touch if you'd like to join as a coordinator or a co-investigator for your language bsky.app/profile/many...

Here they are!

Sorry to blow my own trumpet here, but I've just added all 17 of our empirical studies of the acquisition of under-researched languages to the new @iasclchildlang.bsky.social repository. Huge thanks to all the PhDs/Postdocs/RAs/Collaborators who made them all possible! www.zotero.org/groups/60446...

(Sigur Rós and Godspeed You! Black Emperor make an appearance, but Mogwai do not)

Making Love Out of Nothing at All

BTW Does anyone know a publicly available list of songs with chills ratings? The CHIM dataset linked to in that article (as well as being classical heavy) has only the number of mentions for each (Top is Mozart Requiem in D Minor. Top non-classical seems to be: open.spotify.com/track/01MXkF...

Fascinating stuff, but I wonder if the *intensity* of the emotional experience could be as (or more) important than the diversity. There's a big literature on which songs cause chills (e.g., doi.org/10.1177/2041...) and I feel like some evoke a narrowish set of emotions, just intensely!

An Audit of Social Science Survey Experiments Abstract. Survey experiments have become a popular methodology for causal inference across the social sciences. We study the efficacy of survey experiment

This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social.

We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses.

Here are some of the things we learned:

The recently accepted ManyLanguages project CLAPS - A Crosslinguistic Approach to Passive Semantics led by @ambridge.bsky.social is looking to fill four key leadership roles (Analysis Lead, Scaling Coordinator, Translation Coordinator, Ethics Coordinator). ⏰Deadline: 30th Jan.

I was surprised to see this as I’ve had reviewers strongly object when I’ve claimed in papers that LLMs store exemplars. So was I right all along? Or is there a sense in which what they’re doing isn’t quite “storing exemplars” per se? It certainly sounds like it!

It is unclear to me how much traction Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is getting on BlueSky. I am thinking of switching communication about new papers to LinkedIn, which gives better insight into the # of views garnered. Give us a like if you want Glossa to stay on the Blue side of things.

Verily, it’s a total mystery why this might be a more salient issue in the assortative mating process nowadays 🤔🧐🤷‍♂️

Is one of your goals for 2026 to write more? One question I get all the time is, "How do you make time to write?" So, here is my unsolicited writing advice for the new year:

‘Mutual free movement’ for UK and EU citizens supported by 84% of Brits, in stunning new poll Omnisis poll suggests opposition to free movement was based on lack of awareness and the UK government failing to enforce the rules

Call it “mutual” and suddenly people get it.

What can 40 years of song lyrics tell us about society?

I analysed the lyrics of 1,600 pop songs going back to 1985.

Our music appears to be getting gloomier, less future-looking and more self-obsessed

1/6

Language Development Research, Volume 5, Issue 3 is now available for download on the LDR website. Thank you to all of our contributors!

Wishing everyone a joyous New Year!

ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/101/in...

title line

screenshots from the nine tasks

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵

Hard to think of anything I’ve read that I agree with as much as this! All the different types of “ungrammatical” sentence types I’ve done judgment studies on fit with this - a clash between the meaning of the construction and of some other element (usually the verb) that means it can’t be optimal

Why Do Humans Have Linguistic Intuition? | Cadernos de Linguística

Thom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...

Illustration showing the EU flag and the United Kingdom flag painted side by side. Text reads: “The United Kingdom is coming back to Erasmus+.” An EU flag appears in the bottom right corner.

The United Kingdom is coming back to Erasmus+ 🇪🇺🇬🇧

We have concluded negotiations for the United Kingdom’s association to Erasmus+ in 2027, making further steps in our renewed EU-UK Strategic Partnership.

More ↓
link.europa.eu/vf3vJk

If you value journalism, you have to pay for it. In the past, you would have bought a newspaper or a magazine. In the online world, you need to subscribe or it will eventually disappear under a tide of AI slop and adverts. @manchestermill.bsky.social is one of many local quality sources. Subscribe!

Language Development Research is now accepting submissions for a special issue on Multimodal Directive-Response Trajectories in Children's Language Socialization w/ Guest Editor: Alan Rumsey (Australian Nat'l Uni). Read more here: ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu & here: www.childlanguage.org/latestbulletin

Semantics and Statistics in the Formation of Causatives in Hijazi Arabic: Data From Semantic Ratings, Grammatical Acceptability Judgments and Computational Modeling. New in developmental psychology from Khadeejah Alaslani, Ronnie Wilbur, and @ambridge.bsky.social doi.org/10.1525/coll...

Join The Mill - Quality journalism for Greater Manchester The Mill produces local journalism that is both informative and enjoyable to read — including investigations, culture pieces and opinionated columns about Manchester's biggest talking points.

manchestermill.co.uk/lp-3/?referr... - really recommend subscribing to this - it’s a proper newspaper with investigative journalism and everything- no clickbait or churnalism!

Announcing publication of the full Special Issue of LDR on the Development of Metaphor. Thank you to Ingrid Lossius Falkum and Mary Beth Neff, PhD for organizing this volume and serving as Guest Editors! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/100/in...