  In this study we compared how well DALL-E 2 visually represented the meaning
of linguistic prompts also given to young children in comprehension tests.
Sentences representing fundamental components of grammatical knowledge were
selected from assessment tests used with several hundred English-speaking
children aged 2-7 years for whom we had collected original item-level data.
DALL-E 2 was given these prompts five times to generate 20 cartoons per item,
for 9 adult judges to score. Results revealed no conditions in which DALL-E
2-generated images that matched the semantic accuracy of children, even at the
youngest age (2 years). DALL-E 2 failed to assign the appropriate roles in
reversible forms; it failed on negation despite an easier contrastive prompt
than the children received; it often assigned the adjective to the wrong noun;
it ignored implicit agents in passives. This work points to a clear absence of
compositional sentence representations for DALL-E 2.
