The interplay of referential function and character primacy on referring expressions in children’s narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study considered the linguistic forms used by 63 English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (ages 5;6–8;8) to introduce, maintain reference to, and reintroduce primary and secondary characters throughout their narratives The expected referring forms were used more frequently for the best-matching referential function: indefinites for introduction, pronouns and null forms for maintenance, and identifiables (i.e., definite and possessive NPs, and proper names) for reintroduction. Developmental changes in form–function mappings were present for both introduction and reintroduction. Many children were also influenced by the relative prominence of story characters in their use of pronominals. Nonetheless, function constraints exerted a much stronger influence on referential choice than did character primacy in all grades. By systematically exploring the interplay of referential function and character primacy on referring expressions, this study adds to existing findings on many levels. It also invites future research that manipulates various features of both primary and secondary characters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".