Early Lexical Comprehension: Children's Assumptions about the Grammatical Class of First Words
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the age of 6 months, infants have demonstrated lexical understanding of individual-scope words (like the word “mommy,” which refers to a single individual) and category-scope words (like the word “hand,” which encompasses all hands) (Campbell & Hall, 2022). However, previous studies have focused on monolingual infants, who receive equal amounts of input for both categories in a single language. The present study aims to replicate and extend previous findings by Campbell and Hall (2022) by investigating whether six-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants acquire word categories through conceptual readiness, or if lexical knowledge is determined by linguistic input. As bilingual infants receive unequal amounts of input for category-scope words (such as “hand” in English, and “mano” in Spanish), but experience consistent input for individual-scope words (such as the moniker “mommy”), the study compares monolingual and bilingual infants to assess the nature of word category comprehension. If comprehension is driven by conceptual readiness, bilingual infants should show comprehension of both individual and category-scope words. Using live audio to repeat the words “hand” and the participant’s most frequent moniker for mother (eg. mommy, mama, mom, etc.), infants are shown two side-by-side photos while their looking time is measured. In the category-scope block, a photo of the infant’s hand is shown compared to another six-month infant’s hand, while repeating the word “hand.” In the individual-scope block, the infant is shown a picture of their mother next to an unfamiliar woman of approximately the same age and ethnicity, while repeating the infant’s most frequently used moniker for mother. The current study is one of the first to investigate infants’ object word extensions within linguistically and racially diverse backgrounds, which will further our understanding of the impact of how differing language experiences contribute to the development of lexical comprehension.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.017 |
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