Asking for action or information? Crosslinguistic comparison of interrogative functions in early child Cantonese and Mandarin
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Request for information (RfI) is believed to be the universally dominant function of young children’s questioning, whereas request for action (RfA) has been reported to be the leading interrogative form used in early child Cantonese. The possibility of crosslinguistic variability prompts further research and comparison with additional languages. This study compares the interrogatives elicited from two early Chinese language corpora: Early Childhood Cantonese Corpus (ECCC) and Early Childhood Mandarin (ECMC). Altogether, 1214 and 942 question types were elicited from ECCC and ECMC, respectively. Analyses indicated that: (1) all the interrogative functions identified in an earlier study of Cantonese were also observed in the early Mandarin interrrogatives; and (2) both RfA (49.9%) and RfI (45.5%) were the most frequently observed functions of early child Chinese interrogatives. This crosslinguistic evidence suggests that follow-up studies are needed to further explore the possible influences of language, culture and communication tasks on children’s uses of interrogative forms.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it