Pronoun comprehension and cross-linguistic influence in monolingual and bilingual children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Pronoun comprehension can present challenges for young bilingual and monolingual children. The current study aimed to assess cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and pronoun comprehension in early childhood. Several studies have demonstrated the role of overlap across languages and its impact on language development. The present study investigates the influence of the acquisition of another language containing third-person pronouns on pronoun comprehension in English. Additional possible social influences are also discussed. Design/methodology/approach: In addition to the completion of language surveys and vocabulary tests, toddlers and preschoolers were presented with a forced-choice test to identify the pronouns ‘he/she/it’ between a man doll, a woman doll, a ball, and a monkey. Data and analysis: Accuracy in pronoun comprehension was analysed based on age and preschooler’s accuracy was compared across language groups (monolingual in English, bilingual with and without third-person pronouns). Findings/conclusions: Overall, the results demonstrated that, although young toddlers were able to comprehend ‘it’, children struggled with ‘he’ and ‘she’ until 3 years of age. In addition, bilingual preschool children that were learning a language that distinguished between the third-person pronouns, ‘he’ and ‘she’, performed similarly to monolingual English-speaking children and both groups performed better than bilingual children learning a language that did not distinguish between ‘he’ and ‘she’. The findings are discussed in the context of within- and between-language factors that can impact comprehension. Originality: Most recent research on early pronoun development involves production. This study presents evidence of early pronoun comprehension and investigates the role of CLI in this difficult, yet common component of language. Significance/implications: The results suggest that learning a language with different features can negatively impact pronoun comprehension in another language. The findings are discussed in the context of an integrated system for bilinguals.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".