VP-Ellipsis and Anaphora in Child Language Acquisition
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we report on experiments investigating children’s knowledge of the constraints on ellipsis constructions in English, focusing on subtle contrasts between verb phrase–ellipsis (VPE) and VP-anaphora (VPA). These contrasts are of theoreti-cal interest insofar as they present an apparent learnability paradox: On one hand, the negative constraints on these constructions are underdetermined by the positive evi-dence available to the learner (Crain (1991)); on the other hand, languages systemati-cally vary in the availability of VPE. Hence, it seems as if the constraints cannot be directly encoded in Universal Grammar. Our results—from 2 parallel experiments employing the same stimuli but with different methodologies—show that young chil-dren can correctly distinguish VPE from VPA, respecting the constraints on each.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it