Grammatical Gender in Atypical Language Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We use code-switched structures to investigate how gender is represented in the mind of an adult English-Spanish bilingual (Spanish is the Heritage language) who has Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), a genetic disorder that presents both behavioral disturbances and intellectual and linguistic disabilities. The latter remains entirely unexplored in the case of bilingual speakers. Previous research (Liceras et al., 2016) using an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) and a Sentence Completion Task (SCT) has shown that typically-developing (TD) Spanish-dominant English-Spanish bilinguals (but not English-dominant bilinguals) prefer gender-matching switched Determiner+Noun (concord) and Subject+Adjectival Predicate (agreement) structures, as La[theF] house[casaF] or The house[la casaF] es roja[is redF] over non-matching ones, as El[theM] house[casaF] or The house[la casaF] es rojo[is redM], which means that these bilinguals abide by the so- called ‘analogical criterion’ (AC): they assign English Nouns the gender of their translation equivalent in Spanish. These same two tasks were administered to a 34 year-old male English-Spanish bilingual (English dominant) with PWS. The results show that in the AJT, he rates both matching and non-matching concord and agreement structures high but has a stronger preference for all structures that abide by the AC. In the SCT, he unambiguously abides by the AC with both types of structures as TD Spanish-dominant bilinguals do. These results constitute a first step towards investigating which linguistic abilities may be compromised in the case of the PWS population and provide evidence that bilingualism does not seem to have a negative effect on the activation of formal features in their grammars.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 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".