Preschool children conflate pragmatic agreement and semantic truth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children’s ability to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others has been shown to develop in the late preschool and early school years. This ability to represent, that is to think about, beliefs known to be false is described as metarepresentational development. This article extends these findings to the domain of linguistic representations by exploring how children come to judge statements as true or false of a given reality. It presents two models of judgment, one based on the pragmatics of the expression, the other on the basis of the semantics of the expression. Two studies show that when preschoolers object to what someone has said, they are disagreeing with the speaker, a pragmatic judgment, rather than judging the truth or falsity of what the speaker has said, a semantic judgment. True/false judgments are metalinguistic judgments, later acquired, suggesting a new consciousness of linguistic form.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".