The development of gender-specific patterns in the production of voiceless sibilant fricatives in Mandarin Chinese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article reports on the development of gender-specific speech patterns in Mandarin children’s production of voiceless sibilant fricatives. Ninety-four children aged from 2 to 5 (gender-balanced) participated in a word repetition task, producing a series of words beginning with fricatives. Their speech was digitally recorded and acoustically analyzed. The results indicate that gender-related differentiation in /s/ and /ɕ/ occurs around age 4 and becomes more robust at age 5. The differentiation occurs due to the more anterior articulation location that girls employ in their speech in comparison with boys. In addition, 10 adults (gender-balanced) were recorded to probe the origin of this gendered speech phenomenon. Unlike children, adults only show robust gender-related differences in /ɕ/. Results comparing the speech of adults and children suggest that gendered variation in /s/ is potentially the result of a chain shift initiated by gender-linked variation of /ɕ/. These results are discussed with respect to their ramifications for our understanding of the organization and acquisition of multiple components of children’s phonological capacity.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".