Establish generality beyond determiner–noun agreement

Establish whether the feature-locking result generalizes beyond the single determiner–noun agreement construction family tested in the paper.

Background

The feature-locking analysis compares three variants within one determiner–noun agreement construction: regular, irregular, and adjective-interrupted forms. This design reveals a construction-level separation but cannot determine whether the effect applies to other linguistic constructions or cognitive domains.

The paper explicitly identifies broader generality as untested and proposes a 22-task orthogonal family spanning template similarity, output word form, dependency span, answer vocabulary, and semantic relationships.

References

The feature-locking result (Section~4.3) is established within one construction family (determiner--noun agreement) with three template variants; generality to other constructions and domains is untested and explicitly open.

— Pre-carved Niches: The Formation Dynamics of Modular Task Partitions in Early LLM Training  (2609.01170 - Li et al., 1 Sep 2026) in Section 8, Limitations, item (i)