Questioning the role of lexical contrastiveness in phonological development: Converging evidence from perception and production studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we address relations between lexical and phonological development, with an emphasis on the notion of phonological contrast. We begin with an overview of the literature on word learning and on infant speech perception. Among other results, we report on studies showing that toddlers' perceptual abilities do not correlate with the development of phonological contrasts within their lexicons. We then engage in a systematic comparison between the lexical development of two child learners of English and their acquisition of consonants in syllable onsets. We establish a developmental timeline for each child's onset consonant system, which we compare to the types of phonological contrasts that are present in their expressive vocabularies at each relevant milestone. Like the earlier studies, ours also fails to return tangible parallels between the two areas of development. The data instead suggest that patterns of phonological development are best described in terms of the segmental categories they involve, in relative independence from measures of contrastiveness within the learners' lexicons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".