Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the acquisition of both stable contextual variation and a change in progress by children aged four to twelve. Comparing children and their parents from 19 families, we investigate whether transmission and incrementation effects (Labov 2001, 2007) can be found in two vowel variables in Toronto English: /ae/-raising, a case of stable allophony, and /u/-fronting, an ongoing change. In /u/-fronting, children are extending the change to new, previously non-fronted environments. However, analysis does not reveal the expected incrementation pattern in which older children are more advanced. Instead we find the opposite: the youngest children are most advanced in the change, while the oldest are the most conservative, having retreated closer to the adult norm but still crucially further forward, allowing the change to progress. In the case of /ae/-raising, children are not extending the variation to new environments. Younger children do consistently overshoot the placement of /ae/ in raising environments, while older children appear to have retreated and stabilized in the same range as their parents, maintaining the contextual variation at the community level. We suggest that these patterns could be viewed as a kind of overgeneralization, similar to what is often seen in morphological acquisition.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".