Who is kissing whom? Two-year-olds’ comprehension of pronouns, case and word order
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Two-year olds’ comprehension of pronouns in transitive sentences was examined. Previously, children at this age have been shown to comprehend transitive sentences containing full nouns and pronouns in subject position (Gertner et. al. 2006; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996;), but little is known about when children begin to comprehend the nominative and accusative case in pronouns. Using a preferential looking task, we found that 27-month-old children were able to comprehend transitive, grammatical sentences that had subject-verb-object (SVO) word order and nominative pronouns in subject position or accusative pronouns in object position, but 19-month-old children did not demonstrate this comprehension. Furthermore, neither group showed a consistent interpretation for ungrammatical sentences containing pronouns, in contrast to adult participants. Our results suggest that the ability to use pronouns as an aid to understanding transitive sentences develops by 27 months, before children are capable of producing these pronouns in their own speech.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".