Comprehension of Null and Pronominal Object Sentences in Japanese-speaking Children
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent sentences. While Japanese-speaking children are frequently provided with pronominal and null forms, especially the null form, in reference to previously mentioned topics, it remains unclear from what age they understand the anaphoric use of such referential forms. The current study investigated the age at which Japanese-speaking children are able to identify the presence of topic chains connecting null and pronoun anaphora to the topic referred to by a lexical form in the preceding sentence. We tested children’s comprehension of null and pronominal object sentences using an intermodal preferential-looking paradigm. The results demonstrated that the Japanese-speaking children aged 2;7 and 3;2 as a group looked at the target animation reliably longer after hearing the test sentences than before or during the test sentences. This finding provides evidence that Japanese-speaking children’s ability to track topic chains and understand anaphora in the discourse develop by 2;7 years of age. However, unlike the 3;2-year-old group, the 2;7-year-old group showed weaker performance in interpreting pronominal object sentences, suggesting a possibility that young children find the interpretation of null anaphora easier than that of pronoun anaphora.
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.
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) | 0.001 | 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 it