Papers Language Acquisition
“Language Acquisition” 태그가 달린 논문 565편 · 필터 해제
Lost but not erased: Finding traces of a forgotten language in neural speech models
International adoptees retain phonological traces of a birth language they can no longer speak or comprehend, a persistence typically attributed to a biologically-timed critical period. We asked whether it could instead …
Language AcquisitionSpeech RecognitionA Declarative-Procedural Perspective on Expert Routing in Bilingual Mixture-of-Experts Language Models
We investigate whether Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models develop linguistically structured expert routing during bilingual language acquisition. Inspired by the Declarative-Procedural framework, we analyze lexical…
Language AcquisitionLOPA: Enhancing Spoken Language Assessment via Latent Ordinal Prototype Alignment
Fueled by increasing model scale and multimodal inputs, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for Spoken Language Assessment (SLA). While effective, this paradigm often overlooks t…
Language AcquisitionDango: A Strictly L1-Only Large Language Model for Studying Second Language Acquisition
We introduce Dango, a 1.8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA). While previous studies have explored SLA in langu…
Language AcquisitionLarge Language Models as Modal Models in Linguistics
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has intensified debates about their significance for linguistic theory. These debates are commonly divided into three positions: insulationism, which regards LLMs as …
Language AcquisitionChild-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs
Recent studies suggest that child-directed speech is not conducive to language learning in BabyLMs. However, current evaluations focus predominantly on comprehension and not production, which is central to usage-based th…
Language AcquisitionParameter Alignment Mitigates Catastrophic Forgetting in Multilingual Expert Language Models
While continual pretraining~(CPT) is a practical way to extend large language models to new languages, naïve finetuning on targeted data erodes existing capabilities through catastrophic forgetting. Organizing training a…
Reading ComprehensionContinual PretrainingLanguage AcquisitionGeneral KnowledgeMeasuring Form and Function in Language Models
We introduce quantitative metrics for child language acquisition to evaluate language models. Our focus is on the formal syntactic and functional discourse properties of determiners in English, which young children acqui…
Language AcquisitionCAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child-Adult InTeractions
CHILDES is a paramount resource for language acquisition studies -- yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of the UD-English-CHILDES treebank with gold…
Language AcquisitionCollocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns c…
Language AcquisitionA Data-Efficient Path to Multilingual LLMs: Language Expansion via Post-training PARAM$Δ$ Integration into Upcycled MoE
Expanding Large Language Models~(LLMs) to new languages is a costly endeavor, demanding extensive Continued Pre-Training~(CPT) and data-intensive alignment. While recent data-free merging techniques attempt to bypass ali…
Language AcquisitionLLMs for automatic annotation of Mandarin narrative transcripts
Linguistic annotation of transcribed speech is essential for research in language acquisition, language disorders, and sociolinguistics, yet remains labor-intensive and time-consuming. While Large Language Models (LLMs) …
Language AcquisitionLanguage Acquisition Device in Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) remain substantially less data-efficient than humans. Pre-pretraining (PPT) on synthetic languages has been proposed to close this gap, with prior work emphasizing highly expressive formal la…
Language AcquisitionListen and Chant Before You Read: The Ladder of Beauty in LM Pre-Training
We show that pre-training a Transformer on music before language significantly accelerates language acquisition. Using piano performances (MAESTRO dataset), a developmental pipeline -- music $\to$ poetry $\to$ prose -- y…
Language AcquisitionFilling in the Mechanisms: How do LMs Learn Filler-Gap Dependencies under Developmental Constraints?
For humans, filler-gap dependencies require a shared representation across different syntactic constructions. Although causal analyses suggest this may also be true for LLMs (Boguraev et al., 2025), it is still unclear i…
Language AcquisitionTowards Linguistically-informed Representations for English as a Second or Foreign Language: Review, Construction and Application
The widespread use of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESFL) has sparked a paradigm shift: ESFL is not seen merely as a deviation from standard English but as a distinct linguistic system in its own right. This s…
Language AcquisitionBaby Scale: Investigating Models Trained on Individual Children's Language Input
Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "dat…
Language AcquisitionBringing Up a Bilingual BabyLM: Investigating Multilingual Language Acquisition Using Small-Scale Models
Multilingualism is incredibly common around the world, leading to many important theoretical and practical questions about how children learn multiple languages at once. For example, does multilingual acquisition lead to…
Language AcquisitionMachine TranslationFrege in the Flesh: Biolinguistics and the Neural Enforcement of Syntactic Structures
Biolinguistics is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the biological foundations, evolution, and genetic basis of human language. It treats language as an innate biological organ or faculty of the mind, rather than…
Language AcquisitionHumans and transformer LMs: Abstraction drives language learning
Categorization is a core component of human linguistic competence. We investigate how a transformer-based language model (LM) learns linguistic categories by comparing its behaviour over the course of training to behavio…
Language Acquisition