Early Lexical Comprehension: Children's Assumptions about the Grammatical Class of First Words
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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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 | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".