Successful comparisons in novel word generalization: Executive functions or semantic knowledge?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent studies indicate that the opportunity to compare several stimuli associated with the same novel object noun, in contrast to a single stimulus design, promotes generalization along conceptually unifying dimensions. In two experiments (N = 240 4- and 5-year-olds), we assessed the link between executive functions and vocabulary (EVIP, a French version [Canadian norms] of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), on the one hand, and children's novel word generalization performance in a comparison design, on the other. The experiments used two types of materials: unfamiliar objects in Experiment 1 and familiar objects in Experiment 2. In both experiments, results revealed a significant association between generalization performance and flexibility, whereas no significant links were observed with inhibition, working memory, or vocabulary. For familiar objects, we anticipated that vocabulary would play a more significant role, which was not what was observed. We interpret these results in terms of children's capacity to shift to other dimensions or to re-describe stimuli. Working memory (i.e., keeping track of dimensions) and inhibition (e.g., inhibiting irrelevant salient dimensions) did not reach significance. We also discuss the absence of correlation between vocabulary and the generalization task.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".