Production of Adjunct Wh-Questions in Egyptian Arabic Monolingual and Egyptian Arabic-English Bilingual Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This pilot study examines the production of Egyptian Arabic (henceforth EA) adjunct wh-questions (e.g., when) among two EA-English bilingual Children living in Ontario, Canada and an EA monolingual child living in Cairo, Egypt. The control group consists of two first-generation adult Egyptian immigrants in Ontario, Canada. The focus of the study is on the position of wh-phrases in EA wh-adjuncts, which exhibits a surface overlap between English and EA. In typical English wh-adjuncts, and wh-arguments as well, leaving the wh-phrase where it was originally generated (wh-in-situ) is ungrammatical and the wh-phrase must occur clause-initially (fronted wh-phrase) (Radford, 2004). In EA wh-adjuncts, there are two possible positions of the wh-phrase, fronted wh-phrase and wh-in-situ (Wahba, 1984). Findings from an oral elicited production task showed that the EA monolingual child significantly preferred wh-in-situ (94.4% of the time), and a fronted wh-phrase occurred only once in his responses. In contrast, the EA-English bilingual children predominantly preferred fronting the wh-phrase (97.3% of the time). As the fronted wh-question is the only grammatical option in typical English wh-questions, this result may indicate a possible crosslinguistic influence from English, the majority language of the bilinguals’ society, into EA. Regarding the adult controls, they showed true optionality as they produced roughly around the same amount of the fronted wh-phrase and wh-in-situ, 52.8% and 47.2% respectively. The results are discussed in relation to the crosslinguistic influence hypothesis of Müller and Hulk (2001) and the developmental trajectory proposed by Shin & Miller (2021).
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".