Infants Exposed to Fluent Natural Speech Succeed at Cross-Gender Word Recognition
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To examine the possibility that early signal-to-word form mapping capabilities are robust enough to handle substantial indexical variation in the realization of words. METHOD: Two groups of 7.5-month-olds were tested with the Headturn Preference Procedure. Half of the infants were exposed to words embedded in passages spoken by their mothers and tested on lists of trained and novel isolated words spoken by their fathers. The other half of the infants were yoked pairs listening to unfamiliar speakers. RESULTS: In the test phase, infants listened longer to trained than to novel words, indicating that they successfully segmented the words from the passages. This result was not modulated by infants' familiarity with the speaker. CONCLUSIONS: Under more naturalistic listening conditions, 7.5-month-olds exhibit the ability to recognize words in the face of substantial indexical variation regardless of whether speakers are familiar. This suggests that early word representations are, at least to some extent, independent of the speaker's gender and may reflect sophisticated abstraction capabilities on the part of the infants, which would render extreme episodic models of early speech perception untenable. Additional research using similarly ecologically valid testing methods is called for to elucidate the precise nature of early word representations.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 it