Grandparents in Minority Language Maintenance: Mandarin Chinese in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the role of grandparents in Mandarin Chinese retention by children in Saskatchewan, Canada. The materials for the study come from interviews with 60 Mandarin Chinese/English bi-multilingual children between the ages of 6 and 13 in the families of immigrants from China residing in Saskatchewan, Canada. Additional materials describing bilingual children’s Mandarin language proficiency come from a picture description as well as Chinese characters reading and writing tasks. The interview responses and language proficiency parameters were analyzed with the help of correlation analysis, chi-square (for nonparametric data) and univariate ANOVAs (for parametric data). The results are highly controversial, as on the one hand, they demonstrate that the presence of grandparents residing in the same household as their grandchildren is associated with the grandchildren having fewer non-canonical forms (NCFs referred to in earlier research as errors) in their narratives and fewer phonological NCFs. On the other hand, children who have grandparents residing with them are more likely to have a lower ability to read Mandarin texts with PinYin, spend fewer hours reading in Mandarin, produce more incomplete sentences per utterance, and shorter narratives.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| 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".