Ben Ambridge

What Is Evil? Explaining away even the most horrific acts of violence by saying some people are just wicked is understandable—but it won’t help us build a safer society.

Writing someone off as “evil” is an excuse to ignore the causes of human dysfunction, Amanda Knox writes. “That’s why I keep trying, even when I fail, to feel some degree of compassion for those labeled as ‘evil’”:

How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia) Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus mus...

How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia). New paper by Evan Kidd & al. with Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez
doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

it's wild that R, the ubiquitous statistical computing language, was co-created by a Māori prof (Ross Ihaka) — and yet the vast majority of scientists who use R don't know

this is like inventing the toaster. possibly the largest impact of a single member of an indigenous community on modern science

Are you working on issues of replication and reproducibility of methodological research in psychology? Consider submitting a proposal to my call for papers, happy to chat about your ideas or answer any questions! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

@ambridge.bsky.social is currently working on a ManyLanguages proposal on "Semantic Affectedness as a Universal of Passive Constructions”.

Methodological details depend on the target languages, so Ben has asked us to help find experts. Get in touch with Ben if you would like to be involved 🤓

Nominative determinism strikes again (and for UK followers of a certain age, no, I don’t work on The Archers)

Bernat Klein Studio - a stunning modernist building in rural Scotland.

Bernat Klein Studio - a stunning modernist building in rural Scotland.

If you have the funds and the vision, please buy and restore the stunning Bernat Klein Studio, Galashiels - guide price £18,000.

auctions.savills.co.uk/auctions/30-...

Excited to share this newly published paper on child-directed speech in the Ku Waru and Nungon languages of Papua New Guinea. Congratulations to Hannah Sarvasy, Alan Rumsey, Josua Dahmen, John Onga, and Stephanie Yam! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

Yeah this was me!

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

So what phrase do you guys use for a temporary and/or inadequate solution to a problem? We’d call it a “sticking plaster”, though the real thing is only ever called a “plaster”

Here in the UK you can’t buy Band Aids (I don’t think), but they were still considered well-known enough to work as a pun for the name of a very famous (here at least) 1984 charity single en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_Ai... - I wonder for how many Brits (like me) the pun went right over our heads

Collabra!

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

The open access movement has been captured by the publishers, and the journal system is worse than ever. Suggestions like open review do nothing to make research or peer review better, nothing to break the bullshit of rewarding people for simply publishing, right or wrong.

Where is our courage?

"Dear Academic. Would you like to spend a year putting together a special issue for our journal? You will provide us with all your contacts and edit the issue for us for free. We will then sell access to the work. In return for your efforts, you will be allowed to read the issue, for no extra cost".

Brilliant thread and replies here about how difficult it is to get messages across that contradict people's own views/biases. This resonates with my own experiences with practitioners and policy makers as well as general public. Referenced Guardian article here www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I’ve had lots of messages about my Guardian article, in which I argued we should stop universal mental health lessons in schools. The messages have fallen into three categories, and I’m reflecting on this here because I think it exposes something interesting in the field (and research in general)
🧵

Congratulations to Rhiannon Luyster, Taylor Boyd, Amelia Steele, Thuy Buonocore, Catherine Sancimino, and Sudha Arunchalam on the publication of their paper "Quality of remotely-collected gaze data in autistic and nonspectrum children" in LDR! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/6...

‘A big win’: Dubious statistical results are becoming less common in psychology Fewer papers are reporting findings on the border of statistical significance, a potential marker of dodgy research practices

Thrilled to see a news piece by @science.org on my recent paper. By analyzing p-values across >240k papers, the study suggests that the rate of statistically questionable findings in psychology has declined since the replication crisis began

www.science.org/content/arti...

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Our media coordinator recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Elena Lieven, Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester and one of the recipients of the IASCL's 2024 Roger Brown Award. Watch the interview here: youtu.be/sXwfJLnwJsM

The proportion of p-values between .01 and .05 declined in psychology over the last decade, a strengthening of credibility.

Papers with fewer fragile p-values are cited more. Higher ranked journals assoc. with > improvement, but not higher ranked universities.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Babies Don’t Need Mozart Recordings, Just a Parent Who Sings The salutary effect of music on infants is more about happiness than smarts.

I really like the framing of music-in-infant-care as a contrast to Mozart Effect / 'music makes you smarter'. the first thing actually works whereas the second does not

we didn't frame our Child Development paper (doi.org/10.1111/cdev...) this way but Susan Pinker did in her WSJ piece (gift link):

Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models Seminal work by Huebner et al. (2021) showed that language models (LMs) trained on English Child-Directed Language (CDL) can reach similar syntactic abilities as LMs trained on much larger amounts of ...

“Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models”

I’m happy to share that the preprint of my first PhD project is now online!

🎊 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.23689

This is a great point, and was one reason @abhsarma.bsky.social (with me + @jessicahullman.bsky.social) built a multiverse analysis tool that tries to help experts understand and evaluate the validity of subsets of a multiverse, rather than just shrugging: "enh, results vary" doi.org/10.1145/3613...

Doctoral research fellowships in linguistics and verbal communication (272418) | University of Oslo Job title: Doctoral research fellowships in linguistics and verbal communication (272418), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Friday, February 28, 2025

Interested in doing a PhD on language acquisition in Oslo?

Check application process: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... and feel free to reach out for more information!

PS. We have a nice growing community including Natalia Kartushina, Luca Onnis, @audunrosslund.bsky.social, and many more!

The MacArthur Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas III: A measure of language development in Spanish-speaking two- to four-year-olds <p class="p1" style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-feature-set...

We are pleased to announce the publication of The MacArthur Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas III: A measure of language development in Spanish-speaking two- to four-year-olds. We are grateful to Dr. Donna Jackson-Maldonado and miss her dearly. doi.org/10.34842/12f... #devsci

Cover of "The Stories of your Life: The eight masterplots that explain human behaviour"

My new book "The Stories of Your Life: The 8 Masterplots that explain human behaviour" is out next week. Apparently pre-orders really help with the metrics, so if you think you might buy it at some point, I'd really appreciate it if you could pre-order now! www.amazon.co.uk/Stories-Your... Thanks!!!

We are looking for a new Editor in Chief! For more information, please see the information on our home page - ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu - Self nominations are welcome!