Papers with training LMs
Investigating Critical Period Effects in Language Acquisition through Neural Language Models (2025.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Scholars of human development have long debated whether these phenomena are predetermined by innately encoded developmental changes in the maturing brain or natural consequences of increased experience. |
| Approach: | They use language models to test whether CP effects are peculiar to humans . they find that LMs do not show CP when L2 exposure is delayed . scholars have long debated whether innate maturation changes predetermine CP . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model does not show CP effects when the age of exposure of L2 is delayed. |
Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LMs are highly flexible learners, capable of acquiring linguistic patterns beyond those learnable by humans. |
| Approach: | They train LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages . they find that the model does not achieve perfect separation between attested and unattest languages - suggesting some human-like inductive biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can largely distinguish attested from impossible languages, but does not achieve perfect separation between them and their impossible counterparts. |