The differential substitution of English /θ ð/ in French
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary One of the most interesting problems in second-language (L2) phonology is how to account for differential substitution . This is the phenomenon by which speakers who lack a certain segment (sequence) in their first language (L1) may adopt alternative language-specific replacement strategies in the L2 they are attempting to acquire. It has recently been claimed by Weinberger (1997) that the reason why, for example, Japanese learners of English systematically replace English /θ ð/ by /s z/ while their Russian counterparts always substitute /t d/ is that fricatives are unspecified for the feature [continuant] in Japanese while in Russian, the stops constitute the default obstruents. What is argued here is that this analysis in terms of Underspecification Theory cannot possibly work in the case of European and Canadian French which evince an equally systematic differential substitution of /θ ð/ to /s z/ and /t d/ respectively even though they have an identical system of underlying obstuents. It is also suggested that a perception-based approach to the thorny problem of differential substitution would appear to be a much more promising avenue of research.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it