Phonetic representation of frequent function words in 8-month-old infants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent work by a number of researchers showed that even preverbal infants detect and recognize functors in continuous speech. In our research, English-learning infants aged 11 to 13 months, but not 8 months, recognized frequent and infrequent functors as a class, and represented them in segmental detail (Shi et al., 2003; Shi et al., 2004). Here we report a study on 8-month-old infants’ recognition and representation of high versus low frequency functors. Infants heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a high frequency functor ‘‘the,’’ versus a nonsense functor ‘‘kuh,’’ differing from ‘‘the’’ only in the initial consonant, with the prosody unchanged. Another group of 8-month-olds heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a low frequency functor ‘‘its,’’ versus a nonsense functor ‘‘ots.’’ Recognition of functors would be indicated by longer listening time to sequences containing real functors. Results reveal no differential listening time between ‘‘the+lexical word(LW)’’ and ‘‘kuh+LW,’’ nor between ‘‘its+LW’’ and ‘‘ots+LW;’’ however, ‘‘the+LW’’ and ‘‘kuh+LW’’ together induced longer listening time than ‘‘its+LW’’ and ‘‘ots+LW.’’ We conclude that 8-month olds recognize the frequent, familiar ‘‘the’’ in continuous speech, but it is underspecified phonetically in infants’ initial lexicon. Our previous work indicates detailed specification by 11 months.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".