When words meet a world.

Status and boundary

Source development only. No package, promotion, installation, full release suite, live-memory access, Auto Goal activity or v112 work occurred.

The bounded result supports this claim only:

Experience-driven language-form grounding improved under controlled OWEN WORLD conditions.

It does not establish human English mastery, general intelligence or consciousness.

Implemented developmental mechanism

OWEN now retains mediated LanguageHypothesisEvidence inside the existing DevelopmentalOwenModel. Each provisional hypothesis records a surface feature, abstract construction, candidate semantic operation, semantic-role orientation, observed contexts, supporting and contrary outcomes, prediction errors, confidence, transfer evidence and update order.

The update path is:

world/conversation state → utterance → committed interpretation → observed consequence → error/confirmation → competing-hypothesis update → retry → later blind transfer

No phrase-to-meaning dictionary was added. The same form can accumulate competing candidates, and observations supporting one candidate count as counterevidence to other candidates attached to the same feature. A hypothesis requires repeated evidence before it is eligible to resolve a new utterance.

The learner keeps three separate records:

• original surface form;
• bounded canonical-form candidate for recoverable noise;
• grounded semantic hypothesis.

The canonical layer supplies no world truth. Language hypotheses are persisted only as part of the learner snapshots written through the existing Memory Core-mediated append journal.

Development experience

The Mentor supplied 131 bounded simulated episodes spanning:

• containment, support, vertical and adjacency relations;
• forward and inverse surface roles;
• direct negation and negated secondary relations;
• state-changing event language;
• check-ins, clarification requests, requests and warnings;
• formal, casual, brief, regional and typo-bearing speaker styles;
• gradual clean-to-noisy form exposure.

There were 65 initially incorrect full-arm predictions, 34 immediate successful changed retries, and 31 cases still unresolved after the local update. Immediate retry was not treated as transfer evidence; transfer was measured on frozen unseen exams.

Primary frozen comparison

The unchanged v111.3 Blind Examiner, seed 771113, produced:

The language improvement depends on correctly paired world/conversation consequences. Mere text exposure did not improve the frozen language score; deliberately mismatched grounding damaged it.

Fresh full-arm replications were 95/100 at seed 771114 and 93/100 at seed 771115. Their language-form scores were 14/17 and 13/17 respectively. Previously strong temporal, belief, reference and hard-composition routes remained perfect in all three full-arm runs.

Independent hand-authored blind result

The separately authored frozen 40-case set scored:

• full grounded experience: 22/40;
• text exposure only: 13/40;
• shuffled context: 6/40.

This is positive causal evidence for the bounded mechanism, not a mastery result.

What improved

• unseen v111.3 relation language rose by nine correct cases;
• inverse containment such as container-first contains constructions can recover contained-object and container roles;
• direct negation can become distinct from a negated secondary relation;
• several event descriptions transfer to resulting spatial state;
• some conversational operations and corrupted forms resolve after clean grounding;
• world-outcome mismatch produces visible counterevidence instead of being silently accepted;
• dashboard data now exposes the current surface, canonical candidate, semantic hypothesis, confidence, world truth, prediction error, support, counterexamples and transfer evidence without exposing private chain-of-thought.

Remaining weaknesses

• The independent role score is only 7/16. Novel constructions still reverse roles or lack enough evidence.
• The independent ambiguity score is 0/2. Some wholly novel relational forms inherit unjustified meaning from weak overlapping features.
• Independent conversational pragmatics is 3/8; short unfamiliar social forms remain brittle.
• The primary frozen noisy score remained 11/16. v111.4 therefore cannot claim broad noisy-language improvement.
• One independent scope case failed. Scope is improved but not general.
• Relative score confidence can look high when all activated features favour one candidate; it is not yet a calibrated probability of correctness.
• Development occurs in deterministic simulated OWEN WORLD situations. Real human conversation and open-world sensor grounding remain untested.

Verification

The dedicated v111.4 focused source gate passed 7/7. It verifies Memory Core mediation, competing evidence, role and scope learning, all three ablations, unchanged blind examination, preservation of v111.3 strong routes, prediction-first replay, bounded curiosity and surface/canonical/semantic separation.

Final status:

V111.4 SOURCE VALIDATION COMPLETE — MEANINGFUL GROUNDED LANGUAGE GAIN WITH MATERIAL ROLE, PRAGMATIC, AMBIGUITY AND NOISE LIMITATIONS — AWAITING DAN'S REVIEW